Another Apple product, another troubleshooting conundrum: G5 powers but only grey scr

Hello again my wonderful Apple online peeps. I really want to dabble in the OSX on a native unit and so I bought two G5 units down the street for 20 bucks. One is just for parts as it wont do anything besides click (swapped out the video card from the other one and same problem) I knew I would just harvest that one for parts mainly.

So the working one didn't have a hard drive inside so I formatted an old SATA drive I had sitting around with FAT32 and found that the DVD tray held an original copy of OSX Leopard. I inserted the disc, inserted the hard drive and once it looked like it wanted to install. It then stuck on a folder with a solid ? on it. I read online that a blinking ? means the drive cant be used or you have a bad drive.

Since, I can't get anything now besides a blank grey screen on boot. I have tried holding C after the chime and ALT but nothing. Any suggestions what I should try now?

Thanks for your helps!

So the working one didn't have a hard drive inside so I formatted an old SATA drive I had sitting around with FAT32 and found that the DVD tray held an original copy of OSX Leopard. I inserted the disc, inserted the hard drive and once it looked like it wanted to install. It then stuck on a folder with a solid ? on it. I read online that a blinking ? means the drive cant be used or you have a bad drive.

Click to expand...

We need to first understand how you formatted that drive? It appears from above that you formatted it as FAT-32 and then attempted to install Leopard on it? Or maybe your sentence structure has me confused and you really didn't format that drive as FAT-32? In any event, in case you don't already know, you must format the drive as HFS Extended Journaled before you can install Leopard.

Thank you kindly chscag! I will try this out tomorrow. Thanks for your help.

If the Leopard disk is in the tray, and you held "C" or "alt/option" down, then it should boot into the Leopard DVD, Is the DVD grey (system specific) or black (retail)?

n0n1337Macist said:

I really want to dabble in the OSX on a native unit...

Click to expand...

Hmmm....

It is the retail black DVD. The grey (maybe a bad way to describe it) Mac welcome screen that usually has the apple logo has no logo and stays blank.

I have had the chance to play around on a Hack1nt0sh unit for a little but it really wasn't worth the time as it was not up to date and missing a lot of features.

Ok, when you hold down alt/option, what screen do you get? Any boot up options?

So, it freezes upon the boot screen with the little iWatch icon ticks away and then stops. When I try to run it again, it doesn't display anything on the screen, just blank. I am going to unplug it for a bit and try again later. Any ideas? Probably a main board issue? I know the RAM has been seated right.

pigoo3 said:

Hmmm....

Click to expand...

+1.

I also did a questioning Hmmmm…??? when I just saw the post today.

That will be some pretty old "Dabbling" considering the last of those G5s could only run OS X 10.5.x as the latest.

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g5/index-powermac-g5.html




- Patrick
=======

Hey, for me a Mac is a mac. Guess I wont be running on it anyways as its freezing while booting even the factory OSX leopard disk. Now I have two boat anchors. Oh well. Worth the try just to fool around with some other hardware besides PC for a week.

Pull out some of the memory and make sure the video card is seated. That the processor is seated. That the dvd drive cables are seated or try an external DVD drive to boot from. Take the Hd and nuke it..zero it..with a PC. Put it back try again. Sounds like a hardware issue but Ive had boot disc that just didnt work in some machines.

Make sure the HD jumper is in the correct setting.

Great ideas! Thanks Mac SK!