Hardware issue

New to the Mac world and was given 2 power mac g4's with no hard drives, i tried to put hard drives in and reload the os but it just sits there and thinks, tried changing hard drives and dvd/cd roms and still the same thing. any help would be great. thanks in advance.

Where does it sit and think? What version of OS X are you trying to install?

mac os X snow leopard, when it boots up it just sits and thinks. i've let it run for 10 mins and thats all it will do ..

Snow Leopard is Intel only, your Macs are PowerPC Macs. This would explain why it isn't working. You can only go as high as Leopard on those machines.

So is that the reason it flashes a file folder with 2 faces then goes to a question mark? is there away to tell if the hard drive is being seen by the system?

Ternelson said:

So is that the reason it flashes a file folder with 2 faces then goes to a question mark? is there away to tell if the hard drive is being seen by the system?

Click to expand...

Yes...that's why you're getting that. Due to no OS installed on the HD's. When a compatible OS is installed...then the computer will boot properly.

The next question is...what model Powermac G4's do you have. Since this will help us advise what OS versions are compatible. But since you're new to Macintosh computers...this may not be easy.

These "free" Mac's you got may not be a "free" as you think. Older versions of the Mac OS are not necessarily cheap...and depending on how much ram they have...you may need ram.

Also. Powermac G4's were available from 1999 thru 2004. So at the very least what you have is 9 years old...and could be as much as 14 years old. So don't expect a lot out of them...especially the older ones.

- Nick

its a Model Number M5183 with 1.5 gigs of ram.

"Never look a gift horse in the mouth"

That's a G4 tower, built in mid/late 1999..

But don't worry--most 14yr old computers have already been long-recycled..

You could install OSX 10.4 - that's about as new an OS as I'd recommend.. you can get 10.5 on it with some work, but it's going to be REALLY REALLY sluggish...

that'lll never be powerful enough to handle modern web surfing (ie, youtube won't work), and won't really handle any modern software.. if you can get some REALLY OLD stuff, you'll have a great word processor, but little more.. Or you could load an old version of itunes on it and have a rockin music jukebox...

thanks for the info .. i'll strip them down and recycle the parts ..