Not taking anything away from your advice .. but I have more than one G4 here. I made a copy of OS panther without issues using Toast's Copy format ... which copies as is. No problems booting with the disk. The next best thing i know of other than disk copy is ASTARTE CD-Copy which makes an identical copy of "any" disk format. Apple bought over most of Astarte's (a German company) utilitilies including for video & music, most noticably was DVD Studio Pro 1 which was next to "identical" to AStarte's equivalent that it was based on. Apple's Disk Copy is more advanced yet limited than CD-Copy if you can guess what I mean.

My comments are probably irrelevant anyway. For a start, AStarte was OS 9, etc.