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What to do with an injured or dying iMac G5

Chasealicious

Chasealicious

macrumors member
Original poster
May 6, 2005
91
0
Fayetteville, AR
I have an iMac G5 Rev. B (the last one before the iSight came built-in) that appears to be dead or dying, and I'm trying to figure out what to do with it. I'm hoping it is still worth something to someone, and I may be able to get a little cash to put toward a new machine. The machine was always reliable and covered under Applecare, but at four years old the coverage has expired.

After applying the 10.5.5 software update, the machine never rebooted properly. The machine boots, plays the startup chime, displays the proper grey screen with apple logo, then goes to a solid light blue screen and stays like that for as long as you leave the machine on. Two times the fans turned on to hyperspeed, but it hasn't happened in over a week. I've checked the machine every day for signs of life.

I was able to use firewire target disk mode to recover all my data from the hard disk, then I did an erase and clean install of 10.4 hoping it would have ended up being a software issue. With a fresh copy of the OS installed, the machine still behaves the same way.

The machine's specs: 17" Display, 2.0GHz G5, 2GB RAM, 300GB HD, Airport Extreme + Bluetooth, DL SD.
 
Can you try booting it off of an external drive or replacing the internal SATA at very little cost?

Hopefully it's not the logicboard and if it was I'm surprised that you were able to use Target Disk Mode.
 
If you try and sell it as is, I'm sure the price will plummet. I would take it someplace to get an estimate on the cost of repairing it. It might net you a high enough resale price that makes it worth while. Check ebay and see what models like yours (in working and non-working condition) are selling for so you have an idea on where to go from there.

Good luck.
 
I'll side with Eidorian. If you were able to boot from a CD to do the reinstall, then your issue may just be a bad hard drive. Boot from the CD again and run Disk Utilities to check for problems.
A new hard drive won't cost much and is not too difficult to install in that machine. The resell will be much better if it is completely functional.
 
I had the same thing happened to my iMac G5 over three years ago: Only three months old and the exact thing happened as you described. It was a dead HDD, not the logicboard. Once the HDD was replaced, it's still running to this day:)
 
I had a bit of the opposite experience - computer started having power issues, wouldn't boot, I was SURE it was HDD, but took it in and it was the logic board. Have the exact same machine (except 20") and the logic board has failed twice in 4 years. Fortunately, they replaced it for free both times because this is a known issue. Wouldn't hurt to take it into the Apple Store and have them check it out, though you could also just try putting in a new HDD or excluding the HDD as noted by others in this thread.

Dave
 
I too have the same exact machine. It's a work horse haha 5 people use it daily with every thing from pro apps to games. It's been a great machine.

Personally I had an issue with it starting up also. I looked into it and apple had a program set up to replace the logic board. I made an appointment with the genius and they told me 3-5 days. They called the very next day and said it was ready!

That's been the only issue I have had with it.

Now in terms of selling. I would say it's worth no more than $150. People can easily buy a brand new mini that's 4x faster and has a intel chip for what? Like $599. It's already 4 years old so I think you should be happy it lasted that long and don't expect much more. I would suggest looking into apples recycling program.
 
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