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Installing 10.5 Leopard Issue

T

trewyn15

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 13, 2013
391
1
So as many of you know I have G5 dual 2.0.

I am looking to put Leopard onto it tonight as I finally got a good SATA II hard drive so this thing should be ready to go.

I insert my disc and it keeps spitting the disc out, so I thought I had a faulty .dmg file written on the disc. Wrong...

I pull the drive out and it's a DVR 107PD. After a little more research it turns out that this drive is not a Dual Layer by any means. It's just a DVD reader and writer, AKA useless 10 year old piece of technology right now.

So what I am wondering is if there is any other way to do this. I don't believe I can boot from USB, can I boot from a partition on the hard drive and later delete this partition?

Also, I don't have access to a macbook of any means right now so I don't have access to disc manager or whatever. Can I write this .dmg on my Windows 8 or Windows 7 machines onto a USB or hard drive to make this work?

I look forward to everyone's responses regarding this question.

Thanks!
 
Just so there's no confusion - your Superdrive in the PowerMac G5 will read dual-layer DVDs. It just won't burn a dual-layer DVD - So, I'm guessing that you also need to burn an installer DVD.
jrsx has a good idea, too. It is simple to burn that .iso to a hard drive partition, and boot to that. Your OS X Disk Utility will do that very nicely. The partition can be a second SATA hard drive installed in your G5. The Leopard installer can be restored (or cloned) to an 8GB partition. Once the restore is complete, restart holding Option, and choose to boot from the MacOSX installer. I've made those installer partitions quite a few times, ending with a faster (and more reliable) method to install Leopard.
 
jrsx said:
I would try putting the installer on a separate partition, and booting from it.
Click to expand...

What would be the best way of going about this without disc utility?

DeltaMac said:
Just so there's no confusion - your Superdrive in the PowerMac G5 will read dual-layer DVDs. It just won't burn a dual-layer DVD - So, I'm guessing that you also need to burn an installer DVD.
jrsx has a good idea, too. It is simple to burn that .iso to a hard drive partition, and boot to that. Your OS X Disk Utility will do that very nicely. The partition can be a second SATA hard drive installed in your G5. The Leopard installer can be restored (or cloned) to an 8GB partition. Once the restore is complete, restart holding Option, and choose to boot from the MacOSX installer. I've made those installer partitions quite a few times, ending with a faster (and more reliable) method to install Leopard.
Click to expand...

My superdrive will not, it's DVD only according to online, no Dual Layer.

Again I don't have Disk Utility so I don't have a way to currently do this. Is there a Windows application that would allow me to do this?

To be clear, I have no data or OS currently on this new drive so it is booting to a blank screen/drive.

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EDIT: Deltamac you were right, it will read a DVD-Rdl, I am using a DVD+Rdl. Idk what the difference is but that's probably why I'm having an issue.
 
I have had similar issues with a SuperDrive in my G5. Mac of All Trades sent me a new drive no questions asked as they are not all that reliable and they had ample stock. I remember reading somewhere on a reliability scale the SuperDrive in a G5 normally got a C rating. There is nothing you can do about the defective drive but to circumvent it.

You can either throw the G5 into target disk mode and restore a boot dvd to a 10 GB partition via another Mac. Otherwise if you use a quality 8 GB USB drive which doesn't use any of that funky software "features" it should boot. My G5 dual 1.8 starts from my PNY 8 GB drive, but refuses to start from a SanDisk CRUZER drive so you will need to experiment. Remember it must be in Apple Partition Map if I remember correctly.
 
Altemose said:
I remember reading somewhere on a reliability scale the SuperDrive in a G5 normally got a C rating.
Click to expand...
Yet again, my G5 is an anomaly!

The superdrive in my G5 (Dual Layer) is used every day and has burned hundreds of disks since Feb. 2005. That Mac has been on 24/7 and the logicboard failed first. Replaced it last year. Every part in there except the logicboard (now) is original from 2005 when my boss bought it and all in good working order!

Even the hard drive it came with, which is now in my work Mac Pro as a secondary drive is still going!
 
My first G5 which died of a cooling leak had a fantastic SuperDrive. When I ordered my new dual 1.8 the SuperDrive was damaged. Later tracked this down to broken band on the drive clutch. I replaced it and it works fine. The door does not open fully causing the drive to close.
 
So should I make a bootable USB and burn the dmg to it? I thought they couldn't boot from USB?

Or should I make a partition on a spare drive and use that as a boot drive to burn the dmg to the permanent drive? If I were to do this, how would I do it?
 
You either connect the drive to another Mac and restore the Leopard install DMG to it, or start the G5 in Target Disk Mode and partition the drive with a 10 GB partition and restore the DMG to that. You do this via Disk Utility. I keep one on all my PPC Macs, and while not as elegant as the Recovery Partition on a 10.7+ Mac, it functions even better (does not need to download files when reinstalling).

Your other option is to take a USB drive and format as Mac OS Extended Journaled. Then restore the mounted image for Leopard to the USB partition you just made in Disk Utility. Pop in the USB on the G5, hold OPT and see if it shows up. The USB must be in Apple Partition Map.

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G5s and late model G4 can boot from USB but they are very picky on what drive you use.
 
Thanks for the info!

I'm currently writing the disk to a spare drive I have, I'm then going to try and boot from that disk. By using this I'm going to write the image to the other permanent drive. If this does not work, I'm going to try a USB and hope that it works.

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Altemose said:
You either connect the drive to another Mac and restore the Leopard install DMG to it, or start the G5 in Target Disk Mode and partition the drive with a 10 GB partition and restore the DMG to that. You do this via Disk Utility. I keep one on all my PPC Macs, and while not as elegant as the Recovery Partition on a 10.7+ Mac, it functions even better (does not need to download files when reinstalling).

Your other option is to take a USB drive and format as Mac OS Extended Journaled. Then restore the mounted image for Leopard to the USB partition you just made in Disk Utility. Pop in the USB on the G5, hold OPT and see if it shows up. The USB must be in Apple Partition Map.

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G5s and late model G4 can boot from USB but they are very picky on what drive you use.
Click to expand...

Only problem again is that I don't have a mac computer with disk utility right now.
 
What are you using to create this disk or the DVD from before? If created wrong I believe a G5 will instantly spit it out like a baby that doesn't like its food.
 
Altemose said:
What are you using to create this disk or the DVD from before? If created wrong I believe a G5 will instantly spit it out like a baby that doesn't like its food.
Click to expand...

I burned the dmg straight to the disk via Disk Utility on my girlfriend's MBP. The reason it won't read the disc is because the disc is DVD+ not DVD-.

Right now I'm using TransMac because I only have my Windows 7 machine and i'm using this to write it to my 16GB Transcend USB flash drive. This is kind of my last way to do it since idk how to do it with a partition since I can't use TransMac.
 
The only PowerPC Macs that cannot boot from a USB device that come with builtin USB ports are the B&W G3, the PCI graphics PowerMac G4, and the tray loading G3 iMacs. Everything else, from clamshell iBooks to PowerMac G5's can boot USB devices without a problem. When they can't it's either user error or an incompatible drive partition scheme.

trewyn15 said:
Just hold option until it gets to this screen and it should be there or what?

This is what it looks like with the blank hard drive inserted as well.
Click to expand...

You'll have to do some stuff in OpenFirmware because of the age of your machine. However, this is going into piracy discussion as you downloaded Leopard. Apple never had Leopard available for legal downloading.
 
Intell said:
The only PowerPC Macs that cannot boot from a USB device that come with builtin USB ports are the B&W G3, the PCI graphics PowerMac G4, and the tray loading G3 iMacs. Everything else, from clamshell iBooks to PowerMac G5's can boot USB devices without a problem. When they can't it's either user error or an incompatible drive partition scheme.



You'll have to do some stuff in OpenFirmware because of the age of your machine. However, this is going into piracy discussion as you downloaded Leopard. Apple never had Leopard available for legal downloading.
Click to expand...

Gotcha, so I should be able to boot from USB.

I have the dmg from a legal copy of Leopard because my last system was unable to read the DL disc due to a faulty drive. I could never get that system to work so I sold it. I'm set on getting this to work though lol

Can OpenFirmware be used without an OS?

----------

I've read more about open firmware, thanks for bringing it up!

We'll see if I can figure this out. If you have any input it would be greatly appreciated though!
 
If I have an original disc will the install just pop-up or will I have to press a series of keys to get it to open?
 
If you're having an Open Firmware issue, try resetting the PRAM (Option, Command, P, R while booting, letting go when the machine chimes for a second time, or just remove the backup battery for a couple of minutes). This might help the G5 boot a DVD/HDD that it refuses to boot.

If it's a retail DVD, it should boot no problem by either holding C when booting or the Option key to select it.
 
ifrit05 said:
If you're having an Open Firmware issue, try resetting the PRAM (Option, Command, P, R while booting, letting go when the machine chimes for a second time, or just remove the backup battery for a couple of minutes). This might help the G5 boot a DVD/HDD that it refuses to boot.

If it's a retail DVD, it should boot no problem by either holding C when booting or the Option key to select it.
Click to expand...

I was making the mistake using a windows keyboard, I was holding ctrl and alt, I was supposed to be holding windows button and alt ahha

I got it all to work, booted fine with the 'c' key. Formatted the drive correctly for PPC and it did the rest on it's own haha
 
Good thing you got that G5 running. What a beast of a Mac you got there. Let me know if you need downloads to the free software that runs on PPC.
 
Altemose said:
Good thing you got that G5 running. What a beast of a Mac you got there. Let me know if you need downloads to the free software that runs on PPC.
Click to expand...

Thank you! It is a beast, I love how it handles everything so far especially for it's age. I think I'm just about caught up on downloads and software. I do want to get Aperture 2, Final Cut, CS4 and Office 2008. But those will come with time.
 
Did you take the front bezel off the optical drive so it will work normally with the drive door? I was reviewing your other thread and it didn't appear that you removed it.
 
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