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Installing on an empty HDD, nothing works.

I realize that this discussion has taken place in similar form; however Ive yet to find a situation similar to mine. To preface this, im a poor college student and bought a DP Power Mac G5 at our surplus store for $100 just to mess around with. I tested it when I bought it to make sure and the IT guy said that the hard drives were wiped clean of anything. No problem right? Just grab an install disk of leopard at home and boot from the CD drive. Ive held C when booting and all I get is the flashing finder/? folder indicating that the mac cant find a system file, the same thing happens with the  key as well. However when I hold option it takes me to a grey screen with what appears to be a refresh arrow and an enter arrow, if I jostle a few keys it takes me to Open Firmware where Ive entered boot-cd etc. and all I get is that the load is too small. Agh, please help. :\

PowerMac

Posted on Jul 14, 2012 5:49 AM

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6 replies

Jul 14, 2012 8:23 AM in response to HerpMcDerpus

It's kind of a crap shoot with finding the right build.

If you look up your machine's specs via a serial number database,

Klantenservice: Serienummers


you can narrow down to a good probability of what the released OS version was (find the build released immediately prior to the build of your machine.

Mac OS: Versions, builds included with PowerPC Macs (since 1998)


Tiger Release history

Panther Release history

Jaguar Release history


Otherwise, retail Panther (if an early G5), Tiger and Leopard can be found on eBay.

Leopard will cost more than the machine cost you, as will Tiger.


A Linux distro is pretty much a sure thing.

http://mac.linux.be/content/apple-powerpc-wiki

Installing on an empty HDD, nothing works.

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