Well, I started down a different path before I saw your post.
The entire procedure for upgrading my powerbook with failing hard drive to a larger disk with leopard installed was:
1. Get an external drive and a new hard drive (i.e. I have 2 new drives in addition to my old drive).
2. Use carbon copy cloner to write an image of your drive to external drive.
3. Replace internal hard drive using these instructions:
http://www.everymac.com/systems/app...-g4-how-to-replace-or-upgrade-hard-drive.html
I used:
http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac/PowerBook-G4-Al-17-Inch/Hard-Drive/55/5/
4. Boot from install DVD and start Disk Utility, instead of starting the install.
5. Scan the disk image for restore (find it on the external drive).
5.5: You might have to format the new drive. I didn't because I had tried a different procedure earlier during which I formatted the drive.
6. Select any drive volume and select restore. In the source select the image then drag the internal drive's volume to the destination and check "erase" and click restore and yes and ok and yes, etc.
7. Reboot and see that it boots from the new drive. then upgrade to Leopard.
I had lots of problems due to not know what to do.
First I bought a USB hard disk enclosure that allowed a maximum 80gb drive. Since I couldn't try my 160GB new drive in it, I swapped drives, installed leopard and then discovered it couldn't see my old drive in the USB enclosure...
I then realized I wouldn't have time to install from scratch in time for work on Monday, so I decided I'd upgrade instead.
I first tried creating the image using disk utility. The disk image that disk utility created was 0 bytes for some reason. I chose read/write and uncompressed for the disk image, maybe that was a problem.
So, next I used carbon copy cloner and created the image again, this time read-only and uncompressed. This took about 6 hours.
Restoring using disk utility was not without problems either, I first opened the image (this took about 1 hour), then tried various things which didn't work. Until I selected "scan image for restore".