Would I be able to format it in my PC if I connected it to a USB to IDE adapter with the right number of pins and have it recognized by the PowerBook?

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As long as you manage to put a standard HFS file system onto the disk it might work. Most PC disk utility software will not offer that option. You might try to find any Mac with a CF card reader / adapter and use a more recent version of the Mac's Disk Utility to make a HFS partition with classic driver. This works not with any disk or any old mac, but I was successful with this method several times.