A few days ago I bought a PowerMac G5 for $13 because hey, why not. The seller listed it as not working, and they had removed the hard drive for privacy reasons. From experience, I could extrapolate that it probably worked just fine. This would mostly be the case (making this a pretty boring blog post).
I set up the computer on my desk, plugged into a display and whatnot. It booted up with no issue to the flashing question mark folder; it couldn't find a filesystem because the HDD was empty. However, it did not make the "BONG" noise when booting up — I would later discover that this meant some of the RAM was bad.
So I burned the Mac OS X 10.5.6 installer to a USB drive and– uh oh, guess what's not detected by the OPTION menu. After a fiasco with trying and failing to get the Mac to boot from the USB, I thought, "Fuck it." I ran out to Office Depot, bought some DVD+R DLs, and burned the 10.5.6 installer to one of those. I put it in the machine and, once again, failed to get it to work.
It was at this point I reached out to Reddit™. "Try booting it off another Mac via FireWire," one helpful soul suggested. The only other Mac I had with a PowerPC 970 processor was an iMac G5 — with no OS installed, might I add. While digging that out of storage, I found a "Not for Resale" 10.5.6 retail installation DVD, which I then used to reinstall Leopard on the iMac.
Once that was done (it took about an hour), I decided to put the retail DVD in the PowerMac, because I figured it was worth a try. Lo and behold, it booted off the DVD and I had Mac OS X installed in no time. Absolutely maddening. But at least Mac OS X was working now.
Afterwards, I dug some old RAM out of storage (2GB total) and pulled out the broken RAM (4GB total), leaving my Mac with 4GB of RAM. Hey, that's pretty good. Don't forget to join me next week for "Twist Hopefully Sticks to the Trend of Not Saying 'fuck' That Much."
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