Just thought I would share this with the MR community and see if anyone has ever experienced this before. I'm still baffled at how this happened.
I recently acquired an old 2005 G5 XServe for peanuts and figured I'd spend some time playing around with it as a file sharing server. Started trying to install OS X Leopard onto it but the install would get to "about a minute remaining" every time. I'd leave it overnight, reformat the hard drive, change out the ram, nothing would work.
I figured I'd just use my 2008 MacBook to install Leopard onto a USB drive that I had kicking around and see if it would actually boot up, then realized that the Intel based MacBook could only install onto the drive if it were setup with GUID and of course wouldn't work.
Next up, I tried it on the xserve, formatting the USB drive to Apple Partition Map and for fun pointed the Leopard install to the USB drive and was shocked to see that it completed the install. Figured then that the hard drive was the cause all along. Got a smaller, 80GB hard drive from a friend, unplugged the USB drive (so that the keyboard and mouse could both be connected, only 2 USB ports) and tried booting off the disc. Here's where the story takes a fun twist, with the USB drive NOT connected, the computer booted into the complete OS X environment...User accounts and settings all intact.
So pointing the install to the USB drive, still managed to write to one of the internal SATA drives that it was hanging when attempting to write to in the first place.
Just thought that was a little weird. Perhaps some MacRumorians might find that interesting.
I recently acquired an old 2005 G5 XServe for peanuts and figured I'd spend some time playing around with it as a file sharing server. Started trying to install OS X Leopard onto it but the install would get to "about a minute remaining" every time. I'd leave it overnight, reformat the hard drive, change out the ram, nothing would work.
I figured I'd just use my 2008 MacBook to install Leopard onto a USB drive that I had kicking around and see if it would actually boot up, then realized that the Intel based MacBook could only install onto the drive if it were setup with GUID and of course wouldn't work.
Next up, I tried it on the xserve, formatting the USB drive to Apple Partition Map and for fun pointed the Leopard install to the USB drive and was shocked to see that it completed the install. Figured then that the hard drive was the cause all along. Got a smaller, 80GB hard drive from a friend, unplugged the USB drive (so that the keyboard and mouse could both be connected, only 2 USB ports) and tried booting off the disc. Here's where the story takes a fun twist, with the USB drive NOT connected, the computer booted into the complete OS X environment...User accounts and settings all intact.
So pointing the install to the USB drive, still managed to write to one of the internal SATA drives that it was hanging when attempting to write to in the first place.
Just thought that was a little weird. Perhaps some MacRumorians might find that interesting.