Q: G5 Black & white video when booted from install DVD
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Jul 7, 2013 11:50 PMby Notary Sojak,BDAqua - I should have mentioned that I had run the extended hardware test earlier today - since I'm cleaning up the G5 to sell - and it found no problems. I doubt that it's video hardware since the Option-key display to select the boot disk is in full glorious color every time. When it booted to Leopard on the internal HD earlier today it was also full color video. It's only when boot from the install DVDs that it drops to 1-bit. I had reformatted the HD using DiskUtility on the DVD, which it really tough in dithered 1-bit video, so I'm trying a full system reinstall using only the defaults (I can make out which buttons say Continue or OK but that's about it).
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Jul 8, 2013 7:03 AMby Notary Sojak,"Disc" meaning the hard drive or the installation discs?
UPDATE - the Leopard install failed but I can not read the 4 buttons on screen to see what the problem was. The one I clicked shut the G5 down. I'm going to try a do a reformat on the hard drive again with the "write zeros" option (if I can make out which buttons are which)
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Jul 8, 2013 11:05 AMby Notary Sojak,UPDATE - I again let the Leopard DVD do a default install. This time it succeeded and the G5 rebooted back to glorious color. I then rebooted from the DVD again and this time the DVDs GUI is in full color.
???? It should not matter to the DVD if there's a functioning system on the machine's hard drive.
Going to run all updates now and set it up to leave our home forever. Thanks for the pic BDAqua. Next time I encounter this 1-bit wonderland I'll know which radio button to select to wipe the drive. -
Jul 8, 2013 4:53 PMby BDAqua,Great to hear, thanks for the report!
I suspect what happened, was that the Install also changed some PRAM or NVRAM setting, those are where number of colors are held.
Some earlier Macs store these settings in PRAM:
- Status of AppleTalk
- Serial Port Configuration and Port definition
- Alarm clock setting
- Application font
- Serial printer location
- Autokey rate
- Autokey delay
- Speaker volume
- Attention (beep) sound
- Double-click time
- Caret blink time (insertion point rate)
- Mouse scaling (mouse speed)
- Startup disk
- Menu blink count
- Monitor depth
- 32-bit addressing
- Virtual memory
- RAM disk
- Disk cache
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Jul 9, 2013 2:33 AMby Steven Jones,Hi.
This is not exactly your scenario but I experienced similar video oddities a few years ago with an iBook on which I needed to re-install the System software. I forget the exact details but it was something like that particular model of iBook needed OS X 10.4.2 or 10.4.4 and all I had on hand was the retail 10.4 (ie 10.4.0) original version of Tiger. It booted the iBook OK but the video had dropped down to black and white - not sure if it was 1-bit or a bit higher, but it did indeed make it hard to differentiate things on screen. I eventually gave up and tried again (successfully) when I had located the appropriate installer disc for that model. What I found interesting is that some models will totally refuse to boot from a too-early System version but others will, although with some things not fully enabled (video depth, in this case).
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Jul 9, 2013 5:40 AMby Notary Sojak,I had tried the original install DVD that came with the G5 and that was when I first encountered the 1-bit video.
Realistically, I should have zapped the PRAM & NVRAM to eliminate corruption there as a possiblity but if that were so, why would all the Option-key startups or previous HD startups be in full color?For whatever reason, it's back to running Jaguar just fine and it - and its PCI-X SATA cards - will hopefully soon be someone else's joy (and room reater).
