Why is newly installed internal HD not seen by Utility Disk?

It is a new drive, in replacement of an older one that had gone bust.

The problem is I can't even begin to format it, as its name doesn't appear in the list of the Mac OS installer. I hear (and read) that I need to use a hard drive external case enclosure to format it before I can put it back in. Does that hold water?

The drive should format internally. First, did you get it from a good source? It needs no jumpers so if some are present, remove them. When you say the old drive "went bust" what happened? Were you able to see it?

The new drive is a brand new Western Digital bought from MacWay (France), so no problem from that quarter. No jumpers are present. What actually happened was a fall from a low table, when the Mac was on, after which the drive went tap-tap-tap-tap at regular intervals on startup, with the wheel going round nonstop.

Many thanks, mayer, for going to the trouble of answering me.

P.

The drive should be seen when installed internally. There may be a 128 MEG limit since this is a G4. That means your G4 may only see 128 MB of the drive. To get a full format of the drive it needs to be formatted into two partitions. This can be done in an external enclosure or an adapter. The adapter will work on both IDE and SATA drives. The enclosure can be used as a backup unit or for storage.

Here's a link to a great little adapter that I use: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20T...

Here's an enclosure: [linked product missing or disabled: IF107-072]

If you do go with an enclosure, do the firewire rather than a USB. You can boot from an external firewire but not a USB.