Fallonite
Level 1
(8 points)
Q: iMac G5 won't boot from internal hard drive
Hello,
I am a student at a vocational school studying IST. A faculty member sent us an old iMac G5 17 inch for us to fix. After repairing the motherboard, we had to install OS X 10.5 from the installation DVD, for the customer had erased his drive for security purposes. However, the internal disc drive wouldn't work, so we had to go into Open Firmware mode and boot from a normal PC disc drive that was attached via a SATA-USB adapter cable. We got the OS installed, and clicked Restart on the installer, but the boot screen still shows up as a missing OS folder. We tried going into Open Firmware and setting the boot device to the hard drive, but it would not boot. Some other things we tried:
- Holding down the "D" key at startup to force it to boot from internal hard drive, but it failed to boot
- Holding option to go to the boot device menu, boot device menu froze after a few seconds
- Inserting the 10.5 installation disc into our external DVD drive (as mentioned earlier) and launching Disk Utility>Startup Disk to restart the iMac and boot from the internal drive, but same result as before (missing OS icon)
At this point both the students and the instructor are nearly out of ideas, and I thought I would post to the forums to see if there is anything else we can try before buying a different drive and charging the customer.
Thank you in advance!
iMac, Mac OS X (10.5), iMac G5 17 inch
theratter
Level 4
(3,907 points)
Use Disk Utility to partition and format the drive.
Boot from the installer disc:
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 has loaded select the country and click on the Continue button. Wait for the screen's menubar to appear. Select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. On the left should be a list of mounted drives. Select the out-dented disk entry for the HDD (usually, shows mfgr. name and size or model number.) Click on the Partition tab in the main window. Select one (1) partition from the Partition Scheme dropdown menu. Set the Format type to Mac OS Extended, Journaled. Click on the Apply button and wait for this to finish.
Upon completion of drive preparation you can quit Disk Utility and return to the installer. Proceed with the installation of OS X by following the instructions.
If none of the above can be completed due to HDD related problems, then most likely the drive has died. G5 models use standard 3.5" SATA drives, as I recall.
