use PowerMac to format HD prior to transplant to wintel box?

[marklar2u]

Greetings:

 

I am proud owner of G4 PM (MDD dual 1.25), can't afford new desktop, thanks to a very very kind friend, recently inherited a Wintel HP m7600n running Vista Home Premium (2.16 GHZ core 2 duo, ASUS Leonite MOBO). Money is very tight at the moment (job hunting) but did sign up for the Win7 early upgrade sale for $49 for the media center functions which is why planning as follows.

 

Currently have G4 PM w/ SATA card and a clean secondary HD (250 GB) HD that I'd like to format for use in the HP intel box, goal to have multiboot (WIN7, OS X, Ubuntu) machine. I own retail Leopard disc, bought upon release

 

Can I use the fact that the drive is mounted in the PowerMac to make life easier and do some formatting or installing of some sort now prior to transplanting the drive to the Wintel box?

 

Tentatively planning to create 4 partitions:

 

1) MAC 60 GB = OS X EXTENDED Journaled

2) WIN 90 GB = FAT 32 (will redo as NTFS)

3) NIX 24 GB = FAT 32 (will redo as ext 3 or 4)

4) SHARE 55 GB = FAT 32 (keep FAT to share data)

 

Any other thoughts/suggestions on using the powermac to make this transition easier, save time, or do something better/pre-emptively would be appreciated... or maybe I'm just making it more complicated to try/think along these lines...?

 

Have backed up Vista on HP (which has two 250 GB drives, one w/ OS, one w/ data and a backup image of OS disk), and have Win 7 RC installer DVD ready to roll, as well as Ubuntu, GParted and PING tools... so can even remove the OS Disc, and install/restore in any order that is best/suggested.

 

THANKS!

 

* btw * can the OS X partition be case-sensitive now?