Give the old G5 some love!

Perhaps I need to pull the computer apart and clean out all the dust? I am not sure what is causing this constant beach-balling.
 
I think I found the problem. I took the old 640GB Western Digital Drive out of the G5, put it into my Mac Pro and installed the OS onto it, but the system won't boot off this drive. I think the drive is going bad, which is what has caused so much grief with the G5.

Looking around the inter webs, apparently the old SATA-I controller on the G5 can handle a maximum of 2TB, so it is time to buy a new drive and try again. Is it worth getting the SSD upgrade for the PowerMac G5? The thing booted pretty darn quickly on OSX Tiger before the HDD started going bad.
 
hartleymartin said:
I think I found the problem. I took the old 640GB Western Digital Drive out of the G5, put it into my Mac Pro and installed the OS onto it, but the system won't boot off this drive. I think the drive is going bad, which is what has caused so much grief with the G5.

Looking around the inter webs, apparently the old SATA-I controller on the G5 can handle a maximum of 2TB, so it is time to buy a new drive and try again. Is it worth getting the SSD upgrade for the PowerMac G5? The thing booted pretty darn quickly on OSX Tiger before the HDD started going bad.
Click to expand...
I have a 64GB SSD in my 1.8GHz PowerMac. I did not notice any earth shattering increase in performance from it. I'm sure it boots slightly faster and opens programs faster but I don't use it heavily so I did not observe anything that made me say "Wow!".

However with a 240GB SSD costing as little as $40 these days I see no reason not to unless you need the higher capacity offered by spinning disk.
 
I have looked around the inter webs and apparently the best bet is to go with an OWC drive as apparently, most SSDs now are SATA-II/III compliant, but often don't work properly with SATA-I controllers.

I got SATA-III into my Mac Pro with an OWC Accelsior S card (works very nicely too with native OSX/macOS support) but I think my options are going to be quite limited with the G5.
 
hartleymartin said:
Not sure what is going on but I think that the PowerMac G5 is either failing or has indeed failed. Reduced the RAM back to 2x 1GB sticks and trying to get it to install Tiger again but it looks like it isn't going to work.
Click to expand...

Sounds like hard drive issues. G5s were very picky about HDs. I had a bad ram slot on one of mine but I recall i could still seat the ram with one clip.
 
I have taken the drive out and used it as an extra storage drive on my Mac Pro. Any suggestions as to brands/models of HDD? Perhaps a 500GB Western Digital Black Cavier?
 
hartleymartin said:
I have taken the drive out and used it as an extra storage drive on my Mac Pro. Any suggestions as to brands/models of HDD? Perhaps a 500GB Western Digital Black Cavier?
Click to expand...

I've got two Black Caviers (1 TB and 1 500 GB) and I'm very pleased with them. Try and buy fairly recent ones, although new isn't necessary.
 
I have a spare 160GB 2.5" drive which I can put into an ICY DOCK adaptor to see if it works. Hopefully it is just a hard drive issue and not the logic board going bad.

From what I have been able to gain off various web-pages, apparently the very top-spec model of G5s tended to be the least reliable but the second-highest models were the most reliable. Perhaps I'll look for an old Dual 1.8GHz model and see how it works.
 
I had an old 80GB Fujitsu 2.5" drive salvaged from an old laptop. It is in the ICY DOCK and seems to be working nicely now. It is only a 5400rpm drive, but it seems to work nicely enough. I am posting this from the PowerMac G5.

I also went through and thoroughly re-seated the RAM. I also had a sneaking suspicion that an after-market WiFi card that I have been using may have been causing kernal panics or similar. That card is now gone.
 
Funny thing that I have noticed that it seems to run better on 10.2.7 than on 10.4.11 Something seems to go wrong with 10.4.11. Somewhat unfortunate, as the uses of the machine will be more limited if I only have 10.2.7 installed, but all the games I want to play will work. Setting up the networking with the Mac Pro doesn't seem to work properly on 10.2.7 though, so I would have to use USB sticks to transfer files.
 
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