iMac G5 booting problem (Not an easy one!) Please Help!

[shu82]

Ok, I have an iMac G5 1.9 isight model that is having some booting problems.

The only way I can get the iMac to boot is when I boot it by putting my g3 in t-disk mode and using its hard drive.

It won't boot through its own cd drive. Hard drive was blank.

I booted into OF. Ran: Set-defaults, reset-nvram, reset-all. Still would not boot from CD.

I reinstalled OSX onto it through the g3 by putting the g5 in t-disk mode. The install was prerfect and the g3 booted off the new install on the g5's HD. But, when I try to boot it on the g5; I get the apple/spinwheel then the circle with a bar through it where the apple is. It hangs there.

Ran disk utility, verify and repair drive- Nothing changed- drive is OK

I just want to mount this guy on the wall of my bar and access my other macs through front row. I would go as far as taping a firewire drive to the back to boot from.
Please don't just say "logic board falure" It very well could be something on the board. But i can go deeper than that.

Any other hints or tricks are very appreciated. I have been repairing G3 imac and ibooks and could do those blind. But I am stepping it up a little bit with this G5.

Help me, I don't want to rig it!

 

[CanadaRAM]

There's not a lot to work with here.
"Won't boot from hard drive or CD"

All we can do is guess.
First of all; which exact CD or DVD are you attempting to boot from? If it is not the CD that came with the iMac G5 1.9, you very well may have trouble because the OS's are machine specific.

What OS did you install remotely? See 1) If you attempted to or succeeded in installing a 'foreign machine' bundled OSX, you may have b0rked your hard drive structure.

What do you mean "Hard drive was blank"? This is the internal iMac hard drive, right? Did it appear on the desktop, but had no files? Did it not appear on the desktop? Did it appear with some files but no User files?

 

[shu82]

Retail Tiger-cd-roms PPC version. (Family pack to be exact) Currently used on a Powerbook G4 and my imac g3

Hard drive did have a "private" file that i could not see until I tried a restore through disk utility. (did not work of course) Tried full install after that through t-disk.

Also, the imac was set up to boot from network when I got it (Globe at boot) could it be blocked from booting its local drives?

 

[shu82]

So does everyone think I should go with the duct tape/firewire drive method?

 

[shu82]

Superduper worked! Lord knows what happened. Its booting up fine from the clone.