PowerMac crashing during fresh OS install?

Recently brought home an older PowerMac G5 (early 05) from my dad's office that was on its way to the recycler. The RAM and HDD had been removed from it so I ordered a couple 1GB sticks of RAM and a 1.5TB hard drive and installed them today. I put the OSX Leopard disc in the tray and booted off it, went through the on screen menu to install the OS and about 10 minutes into the install I got this on my screen:



Tried several times and the same thing happens.

Any insight would be appreciated!

Is the HDD formatted to Mac OS Extended (Journalled) and is the memory Mac compatible? Is the install disc a black coloured full retail install model an d not a silver/grey colour? Most PC shop memory is cheaper high density and Macs require low density. Check out memory specs against this:-

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/3200DDR2GBP/

harryb2448 said:

Is the HDD formatted to Mac OS Extended (Journalled) and is the memory Mac compatible? Most PC shop memory is cheaper high density and Macs require low density. Check out memory specs against this:-

Click to expand...

Yes, I formatted the hard drive (or at least I thought I did) then tried installing the OS. The memory is MAC compatible memory from OWC

theelectrician said:

Yes, I formatted the hard drive (or at least I thought I did) then tried installing the OS. The memory is MAC compatible memory from OWC

Click to expand...

If the hard drive & ram are in order...it could then be a bad video card. Worst case scenario is it's the logic board...but let's hope not!

- Nick

Got closer this time:

theelectrician said:

Got closer this time:

Click to expand...

Kernel panics can be very random in their occurrence. They may happen immediately while booting the computer...or your computer may run fine for an hour.

Be assured...even if you are able to complete the OS X install you're trying to do...the kernel panics will still appear. "Most" of the time kernel panics are a hardware issue, not software.

- Nick

Well that is good. I hope its not a bad logic board. How can I tell if it is the video card or not? I assume I cant just replace the video card since I would need to install the drivers first

theelectrician said:

Well that is good. I hope its not a bad logic board. How can I tell if it is the video card or not? I assume I cant just replace the video card since I would need to install the drivers first

Click to expand...

Like I mentioned above...if the hard drive & ram are in order...then it could be the video card. But pretty much the only way to test the video card...is to remove the current one & replace it with a 2nd working video card...which most folks don't have.

If you don't have a 2nd video card...you may be able to get one on e-Bay cheap (cheap for an older Mac would be under $50 bucks). But you also may get lucky, and find one for $10-$20 bucks.

- Nick

Remove and then reseat the RAM. See if that cures the kernel panics. Almost every instance of kp's I've encountered are to do with RAM faults, or faulty RAM. The latter is unlikely, given you purchased it from OWC.

Are you convinced you purchased the correct RAM, ie. 4 (dual 2.0 GHz), or 8 - PC-3200 (dual 2.3 GHz+) 2.5v, unbuffered, 8-byte, nonparity 184-pin DDR SDRAM (matched pairs)? [source: Mactracker]

Check the SATA connection to the hard drive, just to be sure.

hughvane said:

Remove and then reseat the RAM. See if that cures the kernel panics. Almost every instance of kp's I've encountered are to do with RAM faults, or faulty RAM. The latter is unlikely, given you purchased it from OWC.

Click to expand...

Great recommendation "hugh"!

Most of the kernel panics I have run into have also been ram related. In fact last week I purchased a used G5 iMac which just had two BRAND NEW Crucial 1 gig sticks of ram installed by the technicians at my local Apple Store (I found out this info from the previous owner)...and believe it or not...one or both of the ram sticks were bad!

I initially tried reseating the ram first...and that didn't help. Then I removed the ram...grabbed some ram (same type) from another computer I knew had good ram...installed it in the troublesome iMac G5...and everything was fine!

So crazy as it may sound...even brand new good "Crucial" ram installed by Apple...can sometimes be defective.

- Nick

p.s. Called up Crucial...and I'm getting the bad ram replaced under their lifetime ram warranty!

Well I decided to check one more thing; I took the two new sticks of ram out of the #1 slots and placed them into the #2 slots to see if that would help it at all and ran the OS install one more time and it is now up and running. So it looks like I have a defective #1 ram slot, or maybe the #1 slot is only factory ram accessible?