PowerMac G5 New Hard Drive Setup

[2fs2ns]

Pardon the ignorance here, our mac guys are no longer with the company so I'm doing my best to get stuff working over there...

I've got a powermac G5 with no hard drive. It died/used elsewhere/stolen, no idea. I'm assuming the rest of the machine is in working order.

We purchased a new 250 Gb Hitachi SATA hard drive. Plugged it in and booted off the OS X install disc. Get the apple wallpaper with the spinning "hourglass". Shortly after I get a message in a few languages telling me I need to restart the computer by holding down the power button.

We've tried another install disc, same result.

I put the hard drive in another mac and formatted it, OS Extended (journaled). Same result.

There was some Kingston ram installed in the machine, I removed those 2 sticks, same result.

So other options? I've been searching/googling with nothing that's helped so far.

Thanks!

 

[Eric Piercey]

A) Reset the PMU on the motherboard. Probably won't make a diff.
B) Put in a new motherboard battery. Probably will make a diff.

I'm guessing the battery is dead and it doesn't know what to boot from. I had the same symptoms when my battery died on my G5. Steal one from a PC just to test it out and then buy one as needed.

 

[Sdashiki]

Shortly after I get a message in a few languages telling me I need to restart the computer by holding down the power button.

Thats a Kernel panic. Not good. Typically results from bad RAM.

If you removed all the RAM but one chip, and test each that way, see what happens.

Im sure someone here can direct you to the log file dump.

 

[WildPalms]

A) Reset the PMU on the motherboard. Probably won't make a diff.<snip>

My old G5 had sooooooooo many problems with the PMU and resetting it fixed a lot of quirkiness. My root cause? Dirty power. I run line conditioners on all my home equipment now.

 

[2fs2ns]

Thanks guys.

I tested the ram, but I found that I need to have at least 2 chips in as it needs to run in pairs. Get the same error with either set it.

The battery on the board is unlink our PC batterys, it's about the size of half a AA battery. SAFT ls14250c

 

[disconap]

Not only pairs, but matched pairs. They must be the same speed and size, and usually best if they are from the same manufacturer (though not required if they are the same spec).

 

[Eric Piercey]

I know it's a little late, but I just wanted to add, if the battery is bad, you can still get past this screen by holding down the option button and manually selecting a boot volume. It will forget the boot volume the next time you boot, along with the date, but you'll know by the fact that the computer came up it's likely just a need to replace the battery.