imac g5 dvd hell

[ratdude747]

Re: imac g5 dvd hell

google says that the combo drive option is less likely to fail- searches are not littered with complaints of failures like the dvd burners were.

i might go that route as i could burn my dvd's with the external and use the combo to boot.

sound like a possible plan?

[Toasty]

Re: imac g5 dvd hell

Gotta find the ref in Mac forums somewhere. InsanelyMac perhaps? I just saw it last night. grrrrrr....

Try- (model number) failure firewire -in Google

[ratdude747]

Re: imac g5 dvd hell

tried, no luck. all i found was that all of the superdrives suck and you are basically screwed.

my question is are the COMBO drives any good. the ones that do not burn dvd's all they do is read them and burn cd's.

if not, enclosure time?

[Toasty]

Re: imac g5 dvd hell

I have no experience with using the combo drive nor their failure rate. I guess it's a plan of action.

Using a good external drive for booting and burning CD/DVD would be my choice, rather than another questionable internal one. Get a plain CD/DVD reader for the internal.

[ratdude747]

Re: imac g5 dvd hell

they never made am internal reader that i know of.

i will likely get this enclosure:

http://3btech.net/chaliefi3had.html

they are based out of indiana so the shipping is both fast and free.

i will toss in a combo drive in the enclosure for now... my external usb drive is a dl burner.

[ratdude747]

Re: imac g5 dvd hell

got the enclousure, every trick to boot from firewire online has been no use. could the fact that my 10.5 image is special one shrunk to fit a sl dvd?

is there a way to boot it w/o booting into os x first? open firmware (option key at start) doesn't detect it, and yaboot with the linux seems to be making the select boot drive fail.

or is the fact i used a cheap enclosure my issue?

[ratdude747]

Re: imac g5 dvd hell

may i add that i tried re-burning the image onto a fresh dvd and it show ups fine in ox x 10.4.

[seanc]

Re: imac g5 dvd hell

So you're saying you don't get the Apple boot loader if you hold the option key? That's not right.
What keyboard do you have? Can you issue any boot time commands with it?
You should be pressing and holding keys after the chime while the screen is still black.

Make sure your optical drive is set to master.

Failing that, put a HDD in the enclosure, set to master.
Format the HDD in with the Apple Partition Map scheme.
Clone your internal HDD to the one in the enclosure. You should be able to boot from your clone, which should hopefully verify the booting ability of the enclosure.

Another tip, you don't need an internal optical drive if you have an external one. The optical drive in my iMac G5 isn't connected because I broke the connector on the interface board.
You can make a clone of the OS X install disks onto partitions on an external firewire HDD and boot from that till the cows come home - quicker too.
Just press and hold the option key on startup.

Trust me, firewire booting from a HDD does work, I do it all the time using my 'Maxtor' firewire enclosure. Think it uses an oxford chipset - using oxford chipset used to be important back in the day - maybe that's related.

My final suggestion - recap the external PSU for your enclosure, they nearly all use cheap and nasty caps which fail. I've done quite a few.

[ratdude747]

Re: imac g5 dvd hell

it is powered by a 12v wall wart

it gives me the boot screen, but all it gives is my os x partition and my ubuntu ppc partition

it shows a brief bit of activity upon startup.


i assume a powermac g4 sawtooth is useless for target disc mode.

edit- the drive inside the enc. is set to CS. it was set to slave which made it not work at all. the iomega enclosure it came out of had it set to slave. i assume being detected ok in the os elimanates that from the issue list? i will try it set to master just for kicks.

[seanc]

Re: imac g5 dvd hell

Oh ok, 12v PSU might be OK.
I thought it came with one of those adapters which have a 6-pin PC mouse/keyboard style fitting.

G4 Sawtooth does not support TDM if memory serves correctly - I could be wrong. Press and hold T at boot to see if it pops up with a big firewire symbol.

IIRC the option boot screen should look like this on an iMac G5
http://img451.*************/img451/4...1857med6fc.jpg

[ratdude747]

Re: imac g5 dvd hell

yes, mine looks like that.

reads the disc in os x wit the drive as master. trying a boot now.

edit- no luck with the boot

[seanc]

Re: imac g5 dvd hell

hmmph.

Clone the OS X disc to your internal HDD (don't bother if you already have it in ISO format).
Clone that image to a bigenoughinGB partition on the external firewire HDD you might build :P see if you can boot from it.

[ratdude747]

Re: imac g5 dvd hell

iti s an external DVD drive. no mounts inside for a HD.

[ratdude747]

Re: imac g5 dvd hell

idea!

what if i broke up the ubuntu partition and used one for the osx dvd image. and kept it there as a restore partition (like you find on some netbooks)?
and when i installed i used osx to merge the remaining space into one partition?

or would using the same hd mess it up?

[seanc]

Re: imac g5 dvd hell

Oh, the link you gave said it'd take IDE HDD, you could always just sit a HDD In there I suppose.

Yes you could add an extra partition and add the DVD image onto the internal hard drive, although I think live resizing only came in with 10.6, maybe 10.5.

[deckart]

Re: imac g5 dvd hell

I think the problem loading 10.5 is with the custom DVD.The original is a DL,if your new optical has DL read just pop in the original and you should be good to go.You can't put 10.6 on your mac,Intel only.

[Wizard]

Re: imac g5 dvd hell

You should have researched and got correct firewire external box with proper chipset that Mac supports.

Cheers, Wizard

[Toasty]

Re: imac g5 dvd hell

"FireWire booting is possible on all Macintosh models that have built-in FireWire ports with the exception of the Power Macintosh G3 (Blue & White) and the Power Mac G4 (PCI Graphics) models."

"...You may need to upgrade the computer's firmware before FireWire booting will work..."

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2699


Come on RD, get it working...!!

[seanc]

Re: imac g5 dvd hell

"FireWire booting is possible on all Macintosh models that have built-in FireWire ports with the exception of the Power Macintosh G3 (Blue & White) and the Power Mac G4 (PCI Graphics) models."

"...You may need to upgrade the computer's firmware before FireWire booting will work..."

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2699


Come on RD, get it working...!!

I take it the Sawtooth is AGP then?
You should even be able to put discs into the optical drive of the G4 and boot from it over firewire.

[ratdude747]

Re: imac g5 dvd hell

thats what i wondered. but the discs are the problem not the drive (drive showed up in OF with a ubuntu cd)