Problems upgrading iMac G5 to SSD

Question

Level 1

4 points

Problems upgrading iMac G5 to SSD

Has anyone experienced problems replacing the HDD with an SSD in an iMac G5 17” iSight (PowerMac12,1)?

I originally purchased a 250GB SSD from OWC from their product page for my model iMac. Getting the new drive installed and installing a fresh copy of 10.4 from the original discs was no problem. However when I rebooted off the SSD, it never finished booting. It got to the gray screen with the Apple symbol but the progress wheel never showed up. I even tried holding down command-V to see the logs as it boots but that wouldn’t show up either. I tried installing 10.5 and got similar results.

I bought a different brand SSD to try and got similar results as above.

I tried running the hardware test both with HDD and SSD. With the HDD, the tests passed. With the SSD I did get an error on the Mass Storage section. ERROR CODE 2STF/4/3: S-ATA Bus 0 - Master.

OWC’s support suggested resetting the PRAM and the SMC. That didn’t help.

At this point I’m wondering if something is wrong with the motherboard but the fact that it passes the hardware test with the HDD install makes me think that’s not it. As far as I know both drives were compatible with SATA-1 but I couldn’t confirm that with the second drive. Since I bought the OWC drive linked from their page for my model iMac and asked their support about it, I’m assuming it is backward compatible. Both SSDs are good, I installed one in a 2009 Mac Mini and the other in a 2009 MacBook and both worked fine..

Does anyone have any suggestions or similar experiences?

Posted on May 5, 2021 9:28 AM

Reply

Answer 1

May 11, 2021 2:23 PM in response to ssinc

It is not unusual for the diagnostics to report a failure when third party components are installed so that isn't much of a worry about the diagnostic reporting an SSD issue.

The iMac G5 had a lot of serious issues. The power supply and the Logic Board were known to get swollen & leaking capacitors which can prevent the iMac from booting completely or even powering on. It is easy to look for these bad capacitors on the Logic Board since the capacitors are visible as soon as you remove the back cover. It is also possible to look through the openings in the side of the power supply to look for swollen or leaking capacitors. An example of leaking and swollen capacitors can be seen in the image on this page (I see 5 leaking brown stuff and 2 swollen without the brown stuff):

https://elitemactechs.com/blog/swollen-capacitors-imac-g5/

The LCD Panels on these iMacs are also known to fail quite often.

Reply

Problems upgrading iMac G5 to SSD

Similar questions