Gray Screen on bootup - 2005 iMac

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I'm a new member here and I'm hopping that someone will be able to help me with my iMac. It's a late 2005 G5 iMac and whenever I try and bootup my machine I get the dreaded gray screen with a folder with a flashing question mark on it. I have done my fair share of pc repairs, but I'm still a bit of a novice when it comes to mac repairs.

I have tried to perform a Safe Boot and reset the NVRAM / PRAM without any success. My first thought was that something had gone wrong with the hard drive. So I inserted the Mac OS X cd-rom and proceeded to go to the disk utility in hopes that I could perform a archive and Install or simply reformat the drive. To my surprise my hard drive was not listed in disk utility. At that point I figured the hard drive was dead. I went out and purchased a new 500Gb SATAII 3.5 drive. After I installed the new drive in the iMac I booted up the machine from the cd-rom and I was amazed to find that the new hard drive wasn't listed in disk utility either.. Now that I know it's not the hard drive I'm stuck wondering what else it may be.. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
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Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
G'day and welcome to the forums.

Tell us about the system discs. Did they come with the computer? Are they silver/'grey or what? Also your PowerPC iMac is SATA and SATA II may not be recognised. On some drives it is necessary to use jumpers to 'throttle' back the speed of the drive.
 
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late 2012 mini w/SSD
I have done my fair share of pc repairs, but I'm still a bit of a novice when it comes to mac repairs.
... a computer is a computer - change your thinking to see the similarities.

Now that I know it's not the hard drive I'm stuck wondering what else it may be.. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
A problem with the HD cable would give those symptoms - just one possibility.
 
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... a computer is a computer - change your thinking to see the similarities.


A problem with the HD cable would give those symptoms - just one possibility.

Thanks for the suggestion, I will have to give that a shot. I imagine that I'm able to connect any standard SATA cable to test it out?

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Tell us about the system discs. Did they come with the computer? Are they silver/'grey or what? Also your PowerPC iMac is SATA and SATA II may not be recognised. On some drives it is necessary to use jumpers to 'throttle' back the speed of the drive.
You have a good point..I have two gray install disks which came with the machine. I will have to see if I have a old SATA I hard drive laying around anywhere at home I can try on the machine.

I will give these suggestions a try and let you guys know how I made out.
Thanks guys!
 

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