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Resolved New G5 Bind

Auzburner

Auzburner

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Apr 11, 2008
1,255
1
Syracuse, NY - USA
I've been doing a ton of hunting and haven't quite come across this predicament. I recently obtained a PowerMac G5 A1047 DP 1.8Ghz. One problem. No hard drive or optical drive. I have multiple hard drives that will work perfectly, but no OS on them. I also have an optical drive, but no IDE cable to plug into the G5's board.

Therefore, I cannot find a way to get my Leopard.iso or the DVD installed on the hard drives. I have a USB dock where I can connect the hard drive to my MBP detailed in my signature, but the 2010 MBP cannot boot a Leopard disk. I had the intent of booting from the DVD and installing to the externally connected USB Hard drive. The only (cheapest) solution I can think of is to buy a small IDE cable to hook up the optical drive and install using the Leopard DVD at hand.

I'm looking for any other option besides buying the cable. I also have a USB universal drive connector. I hooked up the optical drive I have with that cabling, but the PowerMac G5 will not boot from USB. Found that through research, but I thought I would try anyway. I'm looking for anyone else' thoughts? Comments?

I have VMWare Fusion, but I don't believe Fusion will allow me to boot the disk and select another for install, but please correct me if I'm wrong!

Thanks. :)
 
Last edited:
You could grab a FireWire cable and use Target Disc Mode to install 10.5 on the PM's internal HDD via your MacBook's optical drive.
 
...and if you don't have firewire cable, take USB stick -> format it using APM -> restore Leo image to it -> boot G5 off it and install OS on HDD (use alt/option to select it in Boot X). Works perfectly with PM G5, tested personally ;)
 
666sheep said:
...and if you don't have firewire cable, take USB stick -> format it using APM -> restore Leo image to it -> boot G5 off it and install OS on HDD (use alt/option to select it in Boot X). Works perfectly with PM G5, tested personally ;)
Click to expand...

What do you mean by format using APM? Attempting to restore Leo image to a USB fails with an "invalid argument" error. Thanks.
 
Use your MBP to restore the DVD image to a USB thumb drive.

Plug the thumb drive into the G5, hold option key while booting.

Boot off of the Thumb Drive.

Install onto your HDD.
 
All done. Worked by Restoring the DVD to the HDD using my drop USB dock. What made that possible was Apple Partition Mapping. Once I partitioned that way, everything else fell into place. Thank you for the help. I was betting there was a way to install Leopard without needing to buy anything. Thanks again.
 
minifridge1138 said:
I don't understand..
Did you restore the DVD to the USB drive, then use the USB drive as an installer?
Click to expand...

I used a USB docked hard drive, inserted it into the powermac and booted from the restored installer on the hard drive. Mind you, I have two hard drives in the powermac right now, therefore I used on hard drive to install on another. I was concerned because I read elsewhere that booting from USB does not work on a powermac G5. So I avoided this by restoring the installer from the leopard DVD to one of my internal drives.
 
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