Dual G5 no HD no FW, what now? plz help!!!

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I am trying to repair a late 2004 PowerMac Dual G5 2.0 GHz at work so I can use it; however, the hard drive is not seen at start up (folder and question mark), and also when I boot with option, it does not show up. But when I take out the HD and put it in another PowerMac Dual G5, it shows up perfectly and is bootable with Leopard on it (original installation).

I then tried to put this hard drive and 2 other Leopard bootable ones into a FW enclosure. This external hard drive can be seen by all of the iMac G5/PowerMac Dual G5 tested and is perfectly bootable. It just doesn't get detected by the problematic Dual G5. When I ran hardware test, everything checks out. When I put in the retail Leopard DVD, neither internal nor FW drives would show up for installation.

So then I tried to boot with a USB external drive with a clone of the original hard drive on there, which is not supported by PowerMac natively. I went into open firmware and the USB external drive is not seen on both PowerMac Dual G5's but can be seen by iMac G5 with iSight under "devalias" and is bootable. So now I'm really stuck.

The last solution I'm thinking is ethernet booting; however, I do not have any machine with OS X Server on it. I'd have to somehow make one of the Leopard machines to host the image.

I have tried to reset PRAM numerous times, as well as SMU. Nothing I know of/can find on google has worked yet. Also, there is no 3rd party anything in the Dual G5, everything is original.

I would love to use the Dual G5 instead of the Dual G4 500MHz with Panther on it. I suspect the logic board is bad and that's the reason it doesn't see any SATA hard drive/FW. Besides replacing the logic board which is going to cost a lot, I would like to find an economical alternative. Please help with your expertise/suggestions, thanks in advance!
 
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I'd suspect the same thing, bad logic board. I thought you could only boot to FW HDs....
 
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I'd suspect the same thing, bad logic board. I thought you could only boot to FW HDs....

Nope. You can go into open firmware and if it sees "ud", then you should be able to boot off of it provided that it's a bootable image formated as APS.

What sucks is this powerful machine can see neither an SATA drive nor a FW drive...

What if I attach an ATA drive to it???
 
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If your optical drive is working, I it would be worth trying.
 
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As advised logic board. Struth there are some posts about failures with the earkier model G5's. Many Apple techos think the problem is ov erheating.
 
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Well, I took out the 40GB ATA hard drive from the dual G4 and put that in the dual G5 and it has been working so far! I also verified that both FW ports aren't working. However, the ribbon in the dual G5 only has one end so currently there is no optical drive whatsoever. If this proves to be stable then I'll buy an ATA drive for it but now the question is, can I switch out the ribbon so it has 2 slots, one for super drive and the other one for the hard drive? Also, I have no clue how to mount it... Maybe velcro it on top of the super drive?!

If I ditch the superdrive then I have to somehow install leopard on it then put it in... That's going to be time-consuming...
 
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Well, you could buy a PCI ATA card so the HD could run on a different cable. This way you could mount the HD in its normal position I would think.

If the logic board is going, it it worth it to keep putting money in it?
 
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Well, you could buy a PCI ATA card so the HD could run on a different cable. This way you could mount the HD in its normal position I would think.

If the logic board is going, it it worth it to keep putting money in it?

Yeah I thought about getting the PCI ATA card, but like you said, it's probably not worth it to keep money into it. Therefore, I figured that I'll just buy an ATA drive and if/when the logic board totally fails on the dual G5, I can at least use that drive in the very stable and healthy dual G4. It just sucks to know that such a great and power machine is on its last legs... I have already taken out the SATA 300GB HD from the dual G5 and am using it as a back up external drive haha... Once it actually dies, I might take out the memory and put it in the other dual G5, and also the superdrive into the dual G4 to make the most use out of it (the dual G4 has a CD-RW right now). As for the case, it might be a cool side table?!

Thanks for your help/replies/suggestions/comments guys!
 
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You could sell the case on eBay and easily get $100 for it.

I don't know if you could run a HD and an optical drive on the same cable. I've never tried. I was under the impression it was a no-no or transfer rates were real slow.
 
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You could sell the case on eBay and easily get $100 for it.

I don't know if you could run a HD and an optical drive on the same cable. I've never tried. I was under the impression it was a no-no or transfer rates were real slow.

Yeah that's what I was afraid of. I remember back in the days of custom PC building that was a no-no so... I can always just share the optical drive from another Mac on the network. :) Thanks bryphotoguy!
 

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Haha... The ethernet port just went out today...

Back to Dual G4 I go!

Amazing! It's falling apart right in front of you! Sounds like the Logic board to me also. Most of the issues I have read about with older PM G5's were the Single 1.6 and the Dual 1.8 if I remember correctly. I wonder what a logic board would cost? Have you tried checking ebay just for the fun of it?

I know that brand new the board would be a lot.
 
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Amazing! It's falling apart right in front of you! Sounds like the Logic board to me also. Most of the issues I have read about with older PM G5's were the Single 1.6 and the Dual 1.8 if I remember correctly. I wonder what a logic board would cost? Have you tried checking ebay just for the fun of it?

I know that brand new the board would be a lot.

O yeah, this is actually pretty amazing stuff. I had the Preferences open, and under Network, the "Ethernet" would keep showing up and disappearing. Very rarely it stays there, and even if it does, it says it's connected with a self-assigned IP Address with limited connectivity. Now here's the fun part. I can disconnect the ethernet cable and it still says the same thing!

Anyways, a quick search on eBay yields 3 current auctions for PowerMac G5 logic boards and they're about $300 + shipping. It isn't bad and would be worth it in my opinion (as far as parts go). However, I am not confident that I can swap the logic board myself, especially if I recall correctly, I need to calibrate the temperature for both CPUs or something. So yeah, RIP PowerMac G5 dual 2.0 (June 2004). :)
 

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