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