Power Mac G5 won’t work Help!

[fusionflare]

I bought a powermac g5 off of eBay that had no hard drive so that meant no os. I later bought a hard drive with OS X 10.5 leopard and connected it to the machine. I booted it up and got about halfway through the welcome video and it told me to restart the computer, so I did and then I got the the giant X at the end of the video and it freezes and I haven’t been able to get to the intro video since and it gets to a white screen with a gray Apple logo and freezes, no loading, spinning wheel beneath the logo either. I opened it up and couldn’t find any damage until I checked the power supply. It looked like it had a small amount of water damage but idk if that would cause that. When I start up the machine the light in my mouse lights up then turns off however, if I hold alt and press the mouse button when I turn it on, it goes to the boot menu and works fine unless I press the “next arrow” and it goes to the same white screen with the Apple logo.

I’m new to Macs because this is my first one and I have no idea what to do here. I have no idea if it’s the hard drive or power supply or something else cause if this problem. Any help would be much appreciated thx

 

[casperes1996]

A hard drive that already had Leopard on it you say... How much do you know about the Leopard that was on there? Was it genuine?

 

[AphoticD]

Try holding Cmd-S to boot into single user mode then follow the instructions to run fsck on the boot volume. it may just require a filesystem / disk repair.

If you hold Cmd-V while booting you’ll see verbose boot mode which should give you an idea of where startup is failing.

Given that it initially booted OK, I would suspect a RAM fault. Try reseating the RAM or swapping RAM slots.

Ideally, you’ll want to find yourself a copy of Apple Service Diagnostics (ASD) to run a thorough hardware test (inc. RAM testing).

ASD 2.5.8 is suitable for all G5s except the last gen “Late 2005” models, which requires v2.6.3. Search in these forums for download links to the ISOs then burn to disc and boot from it by holding the option key to get to the boot selection screen.

To visually identify between models, the Late ‘05 G5s (Dual Core or Quad) have twin Gigabit Ethernet ports, while all prior models had just one Ethernet port.

 

[fusionflare]

A hard drive that already had Leopard on it you say... How much do you know about the Leopard that was on there? Was it genuine?

The seller said he loaded an original copy of OS X 10.5 from his copy of leopard so idk
[doublepost=1524185111][/doublepost]

Try holding Cmd-S to boot into single user mode then follow the instructions to run fsck on the boot volume.

ASD 2.5.8 is suitable for all G5s except the last gen “Late 2005” models, which requires v2.6.3. Search in these forums for download links to the ISOs then burn to disc and boot from it by holding the option key to get to the boot selection screen.

I’ll try those options but my g5 is not a 2005 it’s either a 2003 or 2002 it has a single Ethernet port and I’ve already tried doing everything with ram and to no avail also I have a windows keyboard not an Apple keyboard so what keys do I press instead?
[doublepost=1524185634][/doublepost]I was told alt is the same as command on windows so I held alt-v and alt-s and nothing happened

 

[AphoticD]

I was told alt is the same as command on windows so I held alt-v and alt-s and nothing happened

I always thought alt maps to ‘option’. I’m not sure about the command/Apple key, maybe try the Windows key?

 

[casperes1996]

I was told alt is the same as command on windows so I held alt-v and alt-s and nothing happened

Alt = Option

Windows = Command = Super key (Linux)

 

[fusionflare]

So I got nothing from the key commands upon turning the machine on and only holding alt and clicking works to get to the boot menu so I’ll try to find ASD on here and do that but so far no luck

 

[z970]

To visually identify between models, the Late ‘05 G5s (Dual Core or Quad) have twin Gigabit Ethernet ports, while all prior models had just one Ethernet port.

A quicker way to identify the Late '05s is the vertical antenna strip on the back. It's pretty pronounced.

 

[AphoticD]

So I got nothing from the key commands upon turning the machine on and only holding alt and clicking works to get to the boot menu so I’ll try to find ASD on here and do that but so far no luck

Are you able to confirm the hard drive is working okay on another computer? It sounds like the system must’ve become corrupted if it’s not responding to the startup key combos.

Download ASD 2.5.8 to test your hardware and also get yourself a copy of Leopard Retail DVD (or burn an ISO) to perform a clean install of the OS.

 

[for this]

Failing to boot or finish the boot process "could" also be from a failing (not dead yet) PSU. The power is too unstable to go on.

 

[fusionflare]

Alright so I bought a copy of OS X 10.5 leopard and it does the same thing. I’m stuck at an Apple logo on a white screen and that’s it. I have no idea what is wrong. There was some water damage to the power supply but very little so that might be it. I did think it was that at first