iMac Powering down

Joined
Aug 23, 2008
Messages
1
Reaction score
0
Points
1
I bought a my brothers 20" IMAC G5 last year. Recently, it was powering down and never could come back up. I took it to the apple store and they told me it was definitely the hard drive and not the power supply.

Now I am not a technical guy but I my dad is ---somewhat. He bought a drive that he had to format instead of buying the one the apple genius told me to (that is just my dad...) Now the computer powers on, but it has shut down on me several times.

The way it was explained to me was Leopard would automatically power down if something was wrong with the hard drive. My older brother who is a MAC fan and an engineer said it was due to my father formatting the new hard drive instead of buying the correct one. He bought a Western Digital Cavier 360 SATA.

Do any of you know if this matters? THe computer is up and running and has not shut down for hours but it did take me 30 min to finally get it to boot up. Keep in mind, the Apple Genius hooked it up to an external drive and had no issues.
 
Joined
Feb 2, 2008
Messages
447
Reaction score
7
Points
18
Location
Traverse City MI
Your Mac's Specs
15.4" MacBook Pro 4GB 500GB 2.4Ghz
I bought a my brothers 20" IMAC G5 last year. Recently, it was powering down and never could come back up. I took it to the apple store and they told me it was definitely the hard drive and not the power supply.

Now I am not a technical guy but I my dad is ---somewhat. He bought a drive that he had to format instead of buying the one the apple genius told me to (that is just my dad...) Now the computer powers on, but it has shut down on me several times.

The way it was explained to me was Leopard would automatically power down if something was wrong with the hard drive. My older brother who is a MAC fan and an engineer said it was due to my father formatting the new hard drive instead of buying the correct one. He bought a Western Digital Cavier 360 SATA.

Do any of you know if this matters? THe computer is up and running and has not shut down for hours but it did take me 30 min to finally get it to boot up. Keep in mind, the Apple Genius hooked it up to an external drive and had no issues.


Well I do know that Western Digital Hard drives come formatted NTFS. Apple motherboards do not comply with that format so it would need to be OS X Journal formatted. If you have an other mac ( Not MAC-Media Acess Controller) use that to format the HD then reinstall a fresh copy of The OS.
Please Let me know what your results are!
:D
 
Joined
May 18, 2008
Messages
3,612
Reaction score
95
Points
48
Location
Amberley, Canterbury, New Zealand
Your Mac's Specs
MacMini 14.3, 8.1 & 4.1, OS 13.5, 10.14, & 10.11 & 10.6; Macbook Pro 8.2, OS 10.12.
I bought my brothers 20" IMAC G5 last year.
He bought a Western Digital Cavier 360 SATA. Do any of you know if this matters? The computer is up and running and has not shut down for hours but it did take me 30 min to finally get it to boot up.

Can we have the specs of that iMac, and is SATA right for that model? The brand of HD shouldn't matter, as long as it's formatted correctly for the Mac.

Now you've got the HD up and running, use Disk Utility in Leopard to determine how the drive is formatted. If it is HFS+, you should be okay to start putting applications etc on it.

However, if it is FAT32 or NTFS, you will need to reformat it to HFS+ with the original disks that came with the iMac when it was first bought. Hopefully that was your brother and that he has the disks. If not, you may need to buy a full retail version of Leopard (maybe Tiger) to format that hard drive.
 

Shop Amazon


Shop for your Apple, Mac, iPhone and other computer products on Amazon.
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon and affiliated sites.
Top