Cloning a G5 quad

[fluidhd]

Hi guys,

My g5 quad died sort of a few weeks back
I left it running and it must have overheated
No signs of any fluid leak, but the last couple of attempts to boot it up would result in the Mac going over temp pretty quick, or it would fire up, but there would be no graphics output

I now have another quad, it boots into osx a ok, but trying to install Linux on it seems impossible, the install process will never complete, usually hangs at 11 or 22 % 🙄

I am going to try and repair the 1st quad with possibly a CPU transplant from the second one, (I have a 3rd quad somewhere else that never worked, Mac specialist couldn't ressurect it, suggested a motherboard replacement)

Anyway I would like to, if possible clone the openbios firmware and vga bios from the overheating g5 to the ocd 22% g5 quad

Is it possible to do this without a hardware programmer?

So first things first, how would I dump the openfirmware and vga bios firmware from the overheating g5?

Thanks

 

[eyoungren]

Hi guys,

My g5 quad died sort of a few weeks back
I left it running and it must have overheated
No signs of any fluid leak, but the last couple of attempts to boot it up would result in the Mac going over temp pretty quick, or it would fire up, but there would be no graphics output

I now have another quad, it boots into osx a ok, but trying to install Linux on it seems impossible, the install process will never complete, usually hangs at 11 or 22 % 🙄

I am going to try and repair the 1st quad with possibly a CPU transplant from the second one, (I have a 3rd quad somewhere else that never worked, Mac specialist couldn't ressurect it, suggested a motherboard replacement)

Anyway I would like to, if possible clone the openbios firmware and vga bios from the overheating g5 to the ocd 22% g5 quad

Is it possible to do this without a hardware programmer?

So first things first, how would I dump the openfirmware and vga bios firmware from the overheating g5?

Thanks

I have no idea.

But I can tell you that PowerMacs, whether they are G5s, G4s, G3s or earlier do not have BIOS. They have Open Firmware.

If all you're wanting to do is clone the drive, slap the old one in a Firewire case and use Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper on the other Mac to clone the drive.

Unless you did something really special to the Open Firmware on the dead Quad I have absolutely no idea why you'd want to 'clone' that. But if you did do that, then you wouldn't need to be asking how to clone the firmware.

So, OF (Open Firmware) is going to already be exactly the same on both Macs.

 

[fluidhd]

Something freaky is going on with the open firmware of the new working g5, when I was attempting test installs of debian online and offline btw, I used the word yellow as the password, on reboot when I went into open firmware, it changed from white to yellow,

Looks like it has something akin to Intel management engine IME in it's code, hence the reason for wanting to dump the firmware from the overheating g5 to the newer g5

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Have you done generic Powermac troubleshooting operations, like reset PRAM, reset RAM sticks, change CR2032 battery, ran Apple hardware Test with Thermal Calibration?

 

[bkmoore773]

Something freaky is going on with the open firmware of the new working g5....

You can reset the open firmware to the factory default, that should fix any bad open firmware settings. I think you need to boot to the firmware, then give it the command: reset-all.

I fixed a G5 quad. If it's overheating, thermal calibration won't fix it. You need to service the cooling system.

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

reset-all

AFAIK - it reboots system. Did you mean restore-defaults?