Upgrade to Leopard on G5 PowerPC

Question

Level 1

8 points

Upgrade to Leopard on G5 PowerPC

Dear Community,

I have an iMac 17" G5 1.6 Ghz Power PC and I have just bought the Retail Leopard 10.5.6 (5 User family pack) DVD from Amazon.

Here is what I have done so far to try and upgrade to Leopard.

1)

I powered on the iMac and logged onto the desktop. I inserted the DVD and the Install box appeared. Dbl clicked on the install and the box appeared advising me to restart the iMac. I clicked on the Restart button.

The iMac rebooted and I was presented with a Grey box with "Please restart your computer by pressing the restart button or Pressing and holding the power button for several seconds."

This was written in 4 other languages underneath. Being new to iMacs I pressed and held the power button at the rear and once off powered back on. The same screen appeared again...and again...and again.....

Powered back up and pressed eject to remove the disc.

2)Logged onto the desktop and inserted DVD. Opened Startup disk. Inserted the DVD and chose the DVD as the startup disk. Pressed the restart button which restarted the iMac only to be confronted with the same grey screen and instructions to restart....

Has anyone else had this issue? I have read forums and they advise I have the correct Retail version of Leopard for my PPC.

Please help

Yours

Mark😕

iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Apr 18, 2015 1:07 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Apr 18, 2015 1:15 PM in response to Crawlspace71

You are doing something wrong. Do this:

Booting From An OS X Installer Disc

1. Insert OS X Installer Disc into the optical drive.

2. Restart the computer.

3. Immediately after the chime press and hold down the "C" key.

4. Release the key when the spinning gear below the dark gray Apple

logo appears.

5. Wait for installer to finish loading.

After the installer loads it will ask you to select your language then click on the OK button to proceed. Just follow the instructions from there.

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Answer 2

Drew Reece

Level 6

10,660 points

Apr 18, 2015 1:32 PM in response to Crawlspace71

The dialog you are seeing with multiple languages is a 'kernel panic'.

Apple explain them below - they are major failures that stop the OS working as intended.

OS X: About kernel panics - Apple Support

It's possible your hardware is damaged, or it could be the CD/DVD itself. Is the disc new and clean, or used? Inspect it & check it read on other computers if possible.

If you have any external CD/DVD drives they could be tried to rule out internal optical drive. Another option is to clone the DVD onto a disk that can boot the iMac (normally a Firewire disk for these Macs) - it may help if the optical drive is faulty.

Do you have access to any other Macs to use for making a bootable copy or to share the disk from? The disc can be shared via Target disk mode - which can sometimes work for installing… (so long as you have the right cables & another Mac).

How to use and troubleshoot FireWire target disk mode - Apple Support

Also try using the 'boot picker', hold 'alt' at startup to select the disk to boot from the list that appears. See if the installer is listed.

P.S. do you have the original install discs? They have Apple Hardware Test installed which may help you find possible issues.

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Answer 3

Crawlspace71 Author

Level 1

8 points

May 6, 2015 12:45 PM in response to Drew Reece

Kappy and Drew,

Thanks for the replies on this an sorry for the late reply!

I have tried both your replies and still no luck I am afraid.

Kappy

Choosing the Disc at Startup just brought up a the image attached!

Drew,

The disc can be read on the iMac OK.

The Kernel Error only happens when booting from the Leopard 10.5.4 Family Pack DVD

Just to clear any issues this is the spec of the iMac

iMac G5 PowerPC (3.0)

1.6Ghz

256MB Memory

The only thing I can think is the issue is the Memory not being enough as I think I have read that it needs to be at least 512.

Regards

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Answer 4

May 7, 2015 5:37 PM in response to Crawlspace71

I have an iMac G5 running OS X 10.5.8 Leopard. I have 512 Mb of RAM, and I know that's the minimum system requirement for the OS . You won't be able to install leopard at all with 256 Mb.

I hope that helps,

Luke

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