Power Mac super drive

Hi erveryone,

I have a curious case that I have not seen any examples of yet. I've tried to find threads of the same issue but didn't find any as of yet.

I got my hands on a Late 2005 Power Mac G5 (the one with DDR2-533 RAM). I'm struggling to get it to work with a media drive installed.

It initially powered on and I went on to wipe the hard drive through Disk Utility with an install disk. When I tried to power it on with the disk inside, the machin would suddenly not power on. I would press the power button, which would light up and then immediately turn off when I release my finger.

This problem would not go away, so I removed the super drive after reading a bit about the issue and let it cool down for a while. I then put the power cable back in (the 'Trickle' light is on, siginfying it gets the correct power supplied to the logic board) and reset the SMU. The machine would then power on and boot normally.

I've tried with another super drive from another Power Mac G5 and this powered on once but then cma up with a Kernel Panic after it tried to read from the disk. After powering off and on (and resetting the SMU again), the problem still persisted with the new Super Drive installed. I even tried a different 'non-Apple' media drive but the problem persists with any media drive installed.

It leads me to believe there's something wrong with the IDE cable and/or power cable or the controller.

Has anyone encountered this issue before? I've seen my fair share of Apple machines, even older ones like this, but I've never seen or heard about a faulty Super Drive controller?

Thanks for your reply!