G5 Power Mac not booting

[difinity]

I am looking at a G5 Power Mac that won't boot.

It chimes and then sticks on a white screen with the apple logo.

It will go into terminal mode.

 

Any ideas where to start diagnostic wise ? Or any ideas as to what is wrong with it ?

 

thanks

 

Michael

[mac_shinobi]

Have you got any data that you are trying to or want to get off of the hard drive(s) ? If not can you boot up with the OS Installation disc ( Insert disc and holding down the C key on the keyboard which should make it boot from the OS Disc ). Does that get any further ?

 

If not you can try and reset pram and nvram on the G5 ( not sure if this article is related to G5 as the article does not state which machines it relates to ) --> Resetting your Mac's PRAM and NVRAM

 

Possibly SMU --> How to reset the SMU on a Power Mac G5 (Late 2004) or Power Mac G5 (Late 2005)

 

Also have you got a new hard drive to make sure it is not the hard drive which is at fault ??

[difinity]

I've taken the hard drive out and recovered the required files. I have done the SMU reset, but no change.

 

I was trying to get the Mac to boot. I don't have the installation disc, i will have to see if i can locate one from somewhere.

[HodgeHi]

Any retail disc will do the job as long as it is powerpc based. A leopard disc for instance (10.5).

[mac_shinobi]

Any retail disc will do the job as long as it is powerpc based. A leopard disc for instance (10.5).

 

Anything up to 10.5.x will work ( as above PPC aka power pc based ), from 10.6 onwards they dropped support for PPC and is all intel based now.

[Arthur]

If you don't have a 10.5 disc to hand, you could also try the PPC edition of Ubuntu 12.04.

 

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/precise/release/ubuntu-12.04-desktop-powerpc.iso

[HodgeHi]

You may be able to tell what is causing the failure to load by booting into verbose mode. It's either hold down cmd and V or just V on startup. I can never remember which, because they keep changing stuff around

[iSteve]

CMD V will do verbose. You can then follow the instruction before the prompt to do a disk check (fsck -fy).

 

CMD+ALT (option)+O+F will boot you to open firmware where you can do reset-nvram (enter) reset-all

 

We had a load of early G5s which had odd boot issues which were all symptoms of logic board failure (this mostly affected dual 1.8 and dual 2.0 from 2003/4)