Q: How to get this 2004 PMG5 back up and running?
Hello all,
My girlfriend and I picked up a bunch of Power Macs the other day: 1x G5 Quad, 1x G5 2004 Dual 1.8 and a G4 MDD 2003. The G4 works great and I upgraded the graphics to a lovely Geforce 3 Ti200 card. Great OS9 machine!
The G5s though, are a different story. The Quad has the infamous Delphi LCS, which broke. The logic board is undamaged, but the previous owner was not kind to this machine. The red LED near the top RAM slot shows the ill fate of this machine.
My question is mainly about the 2004 Dual 1.8Ghz machine. It POSTs fine, but once it tries to boot from a disk or a DVD, it hangs at the Apple logo. No spinning wheel, just an immediate freeze. The fans go turbo as soon as the open firmware is loaded.
Specifications:
G5 Dual 1.8Ghz from 2004
2GB PC3200 (2x 1GB, tested as working properly in other machines)
Radeon 9600XT
Disks tested include several SATA drives as well as a Kingston HyperX SSD. DVDs include 10.4.6 Tiger and 10.5.6 Leopard, universal versions.
What have we tried so far:
- PRAM reset (machine doesn't respond to the command, just continues it's boot attempt)
- Safe mode / single user mode / verbose mode (again, machine does not respond to the commands)
- Replacing the PRAM battery
- Booting into Open Firmware (works fine, the multiboot section works fine as well, and the install DVDs are detected)
- dev /memory .properties command in Open Firmware (shows SPI data as expected, RAM appears functional)
- PCI SATA card to rule out a defective SATA controller.
What we haven't tried yet:
- Apple Hardware Test to diagnose any remaining problems.
So, dear Apple community, is there something else we're missing here? I can get a Dual 2Ghz logic board + CPUs on the cheap if need be, but I'd rather get this one back up and running.
PowerMac, G5 2004 Dual 1.8Ghz
Posted on Apr 23, 2015 1:17 AM
Sorry for the late reply. Open firmware was indeed accessible, resetting the bajesus out of the PRAM and PMU did absolutely nothing though. A new PRAM battery didn't fix the issue either, nor was the boot device to blame.
In the end, I booted up a copy of AHT and it requested thermal calibration to be run before running any diagnostics. So I fired up the appropriate tooling for that and hey presto, CPU0 EEPROM error message, suggesting a replacement of CPU0. I picked up a few compatible CPUs and replaced both. Same error. The CPU socket for CPU0 is essentially broken, one bent pin, that's all what caused this menace.
A friend gave me a 2003 G5 dual 2ghz logic board and CPUs. I will slap that in this 2004 case and see if that works. If not, then this will be a case for a hackintosh build.
Posted on May 4, 2015 1:46 PM