Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

__Chris__

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 8, 2019
7
6
Hi there,

I got ahold of a iMac G5 (PowerMac8,1) with no hard drive. I stuck a hard drive in it, and since I had an image of Tiger handy, I burned it to disc and installed it. I noticed that I could not get it to install from USB (boot while holding Option and choose an image on a USB drive, which is what I've been doing to install Tiger on G4s), but since I was able to burn a disc, I figured no sweat!

I want to put Leopard on here, but the aforementioned inability to boot from USB means I have to burn a dual layer DVD. I procured two different images, one DMG and one ISO from the internet. My 2008 Macbook Pro with superdrive gives a "there was a problem communicating with the disc drive" while burning and quits. My 2012 Macbook Air with an external DVD burner just hangs up on "finishing burn"; I tried using this disc but the G5 just spits it out when I try to boot from it.

Oh, I forgot to mention, I did try to burn the installation disc from the G5 itself, but it just spits out the blank dual layer DVDs I stick in it.

I found the installation disks that came with a Macbook Pro. It freezes on the Apple screen with spinning wheel. I let it go for about a half hour and it never seems to progress past that point.

Other than finding a retail disc, does anyone have any other advice? Or should I just roll with Tiger on this thing?
 
Last edited:

MacTech68

macrumors 68020
Mar 16, 2008
2,393
209
Australia, Perth
The internal optical drive may not recognize the Manufacturer ID of the dual layer recordable DVD. You could try a different brand of Dual Layer DVD - perhaps Verbatim branded (which are Mitsubishi Chemicals), but that is no guarantee.
 

__Chris__

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 8, 2019
7
6
Appreciate the advice - they are Verbatim Life Series brand discs.
 

Andy2k

macrumors member
Jul 18, 2015
77
17
You should be able to boot from USB. I have had good luck from G3 all the way up to G5 You may have to mess around with the open firmware. Make sure when you format the USB drive that you use Apple partition map (Not fat or fat32 or new Mac OS partition formats or it won’t recognize it). Take a look at this article. You should be able to reformat that machine via USB. Let us know how it went. Read the link I provided you might have to goof with open firmware. Respond back if you need help. I’ve refurbished many PPC Macs. Try the USB method before messing with open firmware. How are you loading the image onto the USB?

Also, it depends on what version of Tiger you are trying to install. Don’t use a disc for a specific Mac. They were intentionally locked down so people wouldn’t pirate the software.
They also have images of Tiger that is installed on 4 regular CD-R. See my link to Mac garden. You should be able to find a working version. Also, make sure it’s for PPC some of the images from 10.5 on will only work on Intel x86 line of CPUs. They will NOT work on PPC.

https://sites.google.com/site/shawn...le-powerpcs-from-a-usb-drive-in-open-firmware

http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/mac-osx-mac-os-10-ppc
 
Last edited:

Andy2k

macrumors member
Jul 18, 2015
77
17
I keep getting weird Forbidden 403 errors on the website, annoying. One last thing I would recommend installing Tiger 10.4 on it when you do get it working. You really have nothing to gain by installing Leopard on it (10.5). Plus 10.4 has backwards compatibility to older Mac OS 9 software. Tiger, IMHO, was one of the best, if not the best Mac Operating System that Apple ever coded.
 

bunnspecial

macrumors G3
May 3, 2014
8,310
6,313
Kentucky
Anything with USB 2.0, and G5s especially, made it especially difficult to boot from USB. There are some models that I'm not entirely convinced can even do it.

With that said, as a start, you can try booting into open firmware(cmd+opt+O+F) and typing boot ud:,\\:tbxi

That particular command is hit-or-miss on G5s in my experience, but at least it's a place to start.
[doublepost=1566654848][/doublepost]Wanted to edit the above but got a permission denied...

In any case, I was also going to add that I've never successfully burned a Leopard disk including several different brands of DL-DVD.
 

weckart

macrumors 603
Nov 7, 2004
5,834
3,510
In any case, I was also going to add that I've never successfully burned a Leopard disk including several different brands of DL-DVD.

I have. A couple of times. Once using Verbatim and another with a no-name disc. I cannot remember taking any special precautions except for the obvious ones: Locking the image and burning at the slowest speed, ensuring buffer underrun was running and leaving the burn with no other services running to interrupt the data flow.

This was many years ago and the quality of dye may have deteriorated (certainly in Verbatim's case) since then, especially since DL-DVDs were always marginal.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.