PowerMac G5. Installing 10.5 off USB device?

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Hi all.

I pulled my trusty old Cypher out of the closet and figured I'd get it up and going as a media server or something. It's got a lot of old data that I'm not interested in keeping and I'd really like to just format/reload her.

My 10.5 disk was rendered unreadable years ago, but I still have my image.

Now, here's where my problems begin.

I'm trying to get the image onto a USB device (external HDD or flash drive) and I'm having a lot of trouble.

Here's the process I go thru.

1) Partition the USB device as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and with the Apple Partition Map.

2) Use the Restore option to load the ISO onto the new partition.

3) Open the USB drive and run the installer, which prompts me to restart the computer.

When I restart the computer, I get a flashing square Earth globe. This has always meant to me that it can't find a bootable device by itself. Remedy for this is to reboot holding Alt (opt on an Apple keyboard) and select the primary HDD and boot. No other bootable devices are shown.

Someone help me. This is driving me up a wall.

My next step is to try to burn the ISO to a dual-layer DVD, but I'm having the hardest time finding them locally..
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Main-11" Air, iPhone 6+, iPad Mini 3, Hi-Fi Extras- Too many to count
You cannot boot a PPC Mac off USB, you either need a FireWire drive or burn the .iso onto a DVD.
 
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R
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That explains a great deal. Thanks.

Am I correct in assuming you need dual-layer media?
 
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Supposedly it's possible to boot from USB using Open Firmware, but I've never tried it. My last few Mac OS X PPC installs were done from an external FireWire hard drive that I cloned the Tiger and Leopard disc images onto as partitions. Much faster than using optical media ;)
 
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Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
Dual layer media depends on the operating system. From memory, which is old and fading,Leopard was the first OS to be on a Dl disc. Onbe did not need DL media to install iit, however
 
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I had the same problem with a imac g5. My imac would not read dual layer discs but I did have a copy of tiger on a single layer disc. I installed this but before installing I made a small , 15 gb partition, on the hard drive. When tiger was installed I did a restoreof the leopard image into this partition. I was able to select this as the start up disc in preferences and installed leopard from there
 

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