G5 Disk Issues

[steve2112]

I just got a hand-me-down Mac Pro at work to replace my 1.8 Dual G5. Yay!

The problems started after I transferred my data and tried to wipe the drives in the G5. It has a 160GB as the boot drive and a 250GB as a storage drive. I tried booting to my Leopard DVD to erase the drive, but it wouldn't boot to it. I eventually figured out the Superdrive had gone bad in it, so I found an external USB DVD drive.

The problem is it will read my Leopard disk in the external, but will not boot to it. My guess is it won't pick up the external fast enough to boot to it. Any ideas on how to get this to work? Also, I never had the original install disks, which is why I'm using the Leopard disk. It currently has 10.5.8.

Secondly, I decided to wipe the second drive. Every time I try to zero out the drive, I get the error "Zero disk failed with the error: Could not unmount disk".

Any ideas on either one?

 

[rickvanr]

For your first problem I'd take the drive out of the external and put it inside. Should work fine as long as the drive inside the external is IDE

Second, not so sure. Restart and try again. Do you really need to zero out the data?

 

[steve2112]

The problem is that the external is one of those slimline external USB models. If I could even pull it out of the case, I'm sure it's SATA.

My employer requires the drives to be zeroed with the 7 pass, so I don't really have a choice with that one. Well, I suppose I could use the old fashioned manual de-gausser on it. (10 pound sledgehammer)

I tried rebooting, and it still gives the error on it. I may just pull the second drive and put it in an enclosure and see if that fixes it.

Edit: I just tried a standard erase, and got the same error with the storage drive.

 

[bluskale]

to my knowledge, you can't boot off usb, so you'd have to get a firewire drive to do it... you may need to boot off an external drive to get the drives to erase.

can you swap out the internal drives into the mac pro?

or maybe easier, get a firewire cable and boot the old pro into target disk mode... erase from the mac pro

 

[OrangeSVTguy]

Are you holding down the Option key while booting up? This should display all bootable devices. If your Leopard DVD shows up (I'm assuming that you are using a Retail DVD of Leopard which is black and not gray as it won't work) after holding down Option key then it should boot. PPC can boot with USB optical drives but not all of them are compatible.

 

[steve2112]

I didn't think about the Option key. I was just holding down the C key to boot from the CD. It is the retail version of Leopard that was used to upgrade it. I guess this USB CD drive wasn't compatible. I got fed up yesterday and pulled the drives out. I'll just stick them in an enclosure and erase them. Thanks for all the tips, though.