Powermac G5 won't startup loud fans

Hi, I wonder if anyone could help me with my problem: I have a late model powermac G5 that will not boot up, after powering on there is no chime, the screen remains black then after several minutes the fans come on very loud. This seems to be a common issue and I have tried various fixes such as: resetting the smu, replacing the video card and replacing the lithium battery - nothing has worked.

I am now planning on buying a new Mac, perhaps an iMac, when I can afford it. My question really is thus: i use my Mac for writing songs on GarageBand, I have songs stored on the main hard drive of the G5 and on an additional internal hard drive in the G5, is there a way I can salvage these files by buying a new Mac? Is there a way to hook up an old PowerPC hard drive onto a new Mac to retrieve the data? Or is there some other way I could do this?

thank you for reading

PowerMac, iOS 10

Posted on Nov 14, 2017 5:57 PM

Posted on Nov 15, 2017 12:14 PM

I've used a universal drive adaptor many times when dealing with a dead computer that have working hard drives:

NewerTech Universal Drive Adapter USB 3.0 -... at MacSales.com

The adaptor works with any Mac hard drive--including vintage/legacy--except SCSI that seemed to disappear around 1998.

Remove the old drive (easy on a PowerMac G5 tower) connect to the adapter and plug the adapter to a USB port on a newer computer. The drive will mount on the newer computer's Desktop like an external drive. From there simply open the drive icon and select the files you wish to salvage and drag then to a flolder on teh new computer.

NOTE: Some owners of iMac G5s find this forum by mistake. If you have an iMac G5, removing the old drive will be more work. If you have an iMac G5 we may want to try something different. Just to make sure of your model, allow me to show some images:

Historically, the similarity of appearance between the PMG5 and FirstGen Mac Pros have caused confusion here, as have the similarity between the names "PowerMac G5 "and "iMac G5." Please don't think I'm trying to insult your intelligence if you have correctly described your equipment. I use caution because of the large number of times that someone asked about a G5 and got a lot of useful answers only to find out later they have a similar-looking Mac Pro that needed different instructions.

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