Q: Best way to install an OS in this situation - and which OS anyhoo?

Give this a try:

Booting From An OS X Installer Disc

  1. Insert OS X Installer Disc into the optical drive.

  2. Restart the computer.

  3. Immediately after the chime press and hold down the "C" key.

  4. Release the key when the spinning gear below the dark gray Apple logo

      appears.

  5. Wait for installer to finish loading.

If you still have a problem then start considering possible reasons:

1. Distorted video may mean a defective GPU.
2. The Snow Leopard DVD is defective or dirty.
3. The optical drive's laser is dirty.

You cannot boot an Intel computer from a PPC version of OS X such as for your G5. Don't bother with it.

Confirm what graphic card it has.

ML can work, some do just fine, but a number of people went back and stuck with 10.6.8: they need PowerPC and Rosetta, power management seems better and fewer issues.

If you won't use Windows but have a Windows DVD then nuke and zero the drive totally first, then boot from Mac OS 10.6.x DVD.

G5s just the OS being present is trouble enough, as said, it won't boot or load at all.

And you should zap PRAM from cold boot to clear up nvram.

Try the DVD w/o any disk drive inside, just slide it out while shutdown, it should be able to boot the DVD that  way just fiine.

.

So a 2008 model that is working correctly should boot any genuine Apple, pressed, silkscreened, "Full Retail" DVD after 10.5.1

.

The hardware could also be defective. Remember that OSX accesses parts of your logic board Windows cannot even see to ensure it's on real Apple hardware. Failures with these parts of the board would cause completely unpredictable results and also explain the reason that the last user has only installed Windows (which would have required deliberatly deleting a OSX partition after the installation and thus severing backup options - frankly a silly thing to do)

I don;t see why things would be any differnt. If you have another Mac, it may be smarter to install to another Mac and then take the hard drive across. If you have no Macs that can take a full sized SATA hard drive and no enclosures knocking around then you may dismiss this idea to a 'if nothing else works' move, but if not it's probably the most reliable way to do so.

BTW have you tried booting from your laptop in target disk mode to see if it isn't an issue with the Apple parts of your Mac or the drive itself?

If you are booting a Mac Pro from an Appropriate genuine Apple "full Retail" DVD later than the version I mentioned above, the DVD is an "Incorruptible" source of software.

The Mac Pro uses Error Correcting Code Memory --single errors are corrected on the fly with no slowdown and double-bit errors halt with a Kernel panic. It's not a Memory Hardware problem. Mac OS X runs with memory protection on -- attempts to write out-of-bounds cause a kernel panic with Memory Protection Fault or Page Fault. The software is not going crazy.

all goes graphically to ****, where either the apple logo gets a horizontal dropout running across it with some fluttery/sketchy looking vertical noise, or the screen goes to blank gray on the top 1/3, black on the bottom 2/3.

Those are graphics Hardware issues, not signs of software problems,

I dont know if you have coverd this already but I am trying to help my son who is an ER doc. His Imac internal HDD died and he has been running 10.5 from an external. I persuaded him to get 10.6 and he tried installing it (after an overnight session in the ER!) and after holding the C etc. it got to 20% and hung. I suggested he try a reset by removing power etc. but he has a ? on screen which I believe means it cant find the internal HDD. Apart from replacing the internal which he should have done a year ago (but apple wanted about $500 to do it!) is disk utility likely to be available from the external which he may have messed up by now with the aborted install attempt? If not, any other suggestions? If you ARE in vancouver you should know that we are freezing here in Montreal!

Absolutely. Disk Utility from the boot disk should detect USB drives as well. But if your install hung, you may have to wipe in order to reinstall unfortunately.

Bejeeber wrote:

 

Or in a real pinch I could put that blank new HD in my G5, install an OS on it, then put it back into the newer Mac Pro....?

In case you are not aware, software written for the G5, known as PowerPC applications, requires Rosetta to be installed for it to work in emulation on the newer Intel CPU Macs.  Snow Leopard has this as an option install (I also recommend you install QuickTime 7 if you go with Snow Leopard).

If you go up to Lion or Mt. Lion, you will lose Rosetta and its ability to run these PowerPC apps. 

Do you have any plans to continue to run this software on Lion or Mt. Lion, and if so, which apps are they (so we can advise you appropriately).

I have no direct experience with Logic, but I believe that there is an upgrade available for Intel.

Separate plugins written for Logic may have PowerPC problems.

Logic itself will work fine in OSX, but beware that I have heard running Logic 8 in 0.7 or later is a pain and unsupported.

As for your plugins. there are a few I know have issues.

EWQLSO's built in plugin interface is PPC only and uses EWQL PLAY or Kontakt on intel Macs. It ill be fine for making new stuff but you will lose the ability to just open up old files (you will have to load the new plugin and load the patch/ program the settings again). Absynth 3 I think has  similar problems and fails L9 verification too.

I can confirm every other one works (with updates) except the follwing which I have not used or seen used:

Sample Manager

Retrospect 6

Audio damage Replicant

Audio damage Vapor

AudioEase Rivber Run

digitalfishphones blockfish

Amplitube X-Gear

Vicomsoft FTP client