Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Found A G5 Power Mac

R

RickNunn

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 25, 2006
31
0
Hi Guys,

Some friends recently bought a pub and in the attic they found a G5 Power Mac. :confused: It has no box or cables or wires or keyboard or hard drive.

Any way im trying to find out a bit about it. It has had the hard drive taken out. So when it boots it has the folder question mark icon on it.

Im wondering what my best course of action is. I have an intel iMac, can I use that to make a bootable usb drive? if so how?

Can I put my Leopard disks in the drive and get it to boot into some sort of diagnostic mode?

Any help would be great thanks Rick.
 
Bootable USB drive? Nope. You'll need to stick a SATA drive in there. The two bays are at the top rear of the case. Beware though, you may be missing the little rubber feet that allow drives to slot into the cage.

iMac Leopard discs won't work. You'll need G5 restore discs for the model, or a retail copy of Panther, Tiger or Leopard.
 
Hmmm im going to have to find a sata drive then.

My copy of leopard is retail. I bought the upgrade as my iMac came with Tiger.

With out getting a sata drive in there is there any way of it telling me what hardware its got?
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5F136 Safari/525.20)

You can boot to the leopard retail disc. You will need a keyboard though. Boot it while holding down the c key with the disc in the drive. I think you can get a system profile from there.
 
you can boot with USB (sometimes a hit or miss...but generally works for me on macpros and g5's mbp's etc)
just press Option at boot up or it should just recognize the drive itself.


And yes you can place the Leopard disc in and get to diagnostics.

But you may be able to take that drive out of your other mac and put it in the bay as well and boot from it if it has leopard on it, as its a universal operating system and will see all the components etc.
 
Even without a keyboard, if there is no hard drive it goes through the boot sequence and will find the Leopard in the CD drive and boot off that. Good find too. Here's to it being a quad 2.5 :D

You can boot from Firewire but I don't think you can boot from USB on PPC macs. I've booted from external DVD drives via USB with my Tiger DVD on my old G3 ibook.
 
You definitely wont be able to boot from USB as only firewire and DVD booting are supported on PowerMac G5's (I have one).

You should have no problems booting from a Retail Leopard DVD. You will then be able to install it on either an internal SATA drive or external firewire drive.
 
Just seen on the side of it, it says its a 2.7 with 512 ram, although it looks to have the full 8gig in there.

What are the 2.7s like in terms of speed? say compared to my 2.16 intel imac?
 
RickNunn said:
Just seen on the side of it, it says its a 2.7 with 512 ram, although it looks to have the full 8gig in there.

What are the 2.7s like in terms of speed? say compared to my 2.16 intel imac?
Click to expand...

Awesome. Should be the same speed or better for cpu benchmarks. My 2.0 gets 100 on Xbench and my 2.16 gets 120.

HOWEVER. You need to look for coolant leaks on this thing. Being that its been sitting around for a while, it could be on the brink of corrosion.
 
It looks really clean on inside. Bit tatty on the out side...

They wont let me keep it :( they want to sell it and make some money...

They worth much? I had a quick look on ebay but couldn't see any thing that was an exact match.
 
RickNunn said:
It looks really clean on inside. Bit tatty on the out side...

They wont let me keep it :( they want to sell it and make some money...

They worth much? I had a quick look on ebay but couldn't see any thing that was an exact match.
Click to expand...

I sold a 2x2.5 Liquid Cooled, 4Gb RAM, 250+500Gb HDDs, SuperDrive, AirPort & Bluetooth for £800 three months ago.
 
RickNunn said:
It looks really clean on inside. Bit tatty on the out side...

They wont let me keep it :( they want to sell it and make some money...

They worth much? I had a quick look on ebay but couldn't see any thing that was an exact match.
Click to expand...

I'd tell them it ain't worth sh**, but you'll take it off their hands for $100.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back