power mac g5?

I recently picked up an old power mac G5 for free, thought it was worth having a fiddle with.

Any one had any experience fixing these beasties? because it's currently like banging my head against a wall :wallbash:

It's coming on, but not getting into the OS, just a grey screen with a question mark/folder icon I think it might be missing the OS

Also worryingly some red led's on the logic board, after a lot of hunting I've found out that the led leads to "Contact Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider" :rolleyes: thanks apple that's a really descriptive fault, a bit more digging later and it's it's due to CPU over temperature, not that it's currently over temperature but has gone over temperature at some point . . .

Need to remove the whole cpu&cooling unit, as it's a liquid cooling system probably have to check it.

Then AFAIK you HAVE to run the Apple Service Diagnostic to recalibrate the cooler, but you cannot get that unless you are an Authorised apple service agent and they no longer support the G5 so you cannot get it repaired anyway.

And people wonder why I don't like mac's

Any help anyone? is it even worth my time looking at this or should I just strip it out and mod the case for ATX?
Would be a shame as it's a really nice system, it's the 2005 Power Macintosh G5 "Quad Core", ie two PowerPC 970MP 2.5ghz cpu's with a liquid cooling unit, with 2.5gb of ddr2 and an geforce 6600gt

I've toyed with the idea of getting something along those line myself to play with, considering how cheaply you can pick them up now, but mostly out of interest in the hardware and PPC CPU.

You've probably already found this page, but just in case not, it seems relevant: http://support.apple.com/kb/ts1440

The G5 is a bare die AFAIK, so use extra caution when working with the cooling system. I have no idea what the red LED could mean, but considering the system is still booting(ish) there hopefully won't be any permanent damage. Also, I think the CPU is modern enough to trip itself before melting down, so maybe the overheat warning would disappear after a successful boot? Either that or it comes on because the fact it's overheated in the first place signifies something could be wrong with the cooling system, and won't go off without 'servicing'?

Interested to know how you get on anyway. :)

Yep I've seen that, basically I need to reinstall the OS, so I've got to track down an OSX 10.5.8 Leopard cd

http://www.scribd.com/doc/21536787/A...-Repair-Manual
Page 140, unfortunately once it goes over temp once it will refuse to work until the cooler has been recalibrated.
Although it could be a dead cpu or the cooler leaked and is empty (no sign of leaks so far), I did clean out a load of dust.
Mac's are just so non-user serviceable. :(

Does resetting SMU/PMU as detailed here have any effect? https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1538445?tstart=0

Edit: AFAIK the thermal calibration should be accessible from within the OS; I don't see anything suggesting an overtemp would prevent booting.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Pob255

Yep I've seen that, basically I need to reinstall the OS

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Instead of installing macos you could try this alternative? It is a fantastic OS to play around with :)

http://www.morphos-team.net/downloads

Quote:

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Originally Posted by carvedeye

Instead of installing macos you could try this alternative? It is a fantastic OS to play around with :)

http://www.morphos-team.net/downloads

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Hm, an AmigaOS livecd thing? Don't see the point of that but then I never liked AmigaOS.

However, a LiveCD was what I was going to suggest. There should still be some Linux's compiled for PPC available. For x86 I used to use PartedMagic but that's gone commercial now. There should still be some PPC Ubuntu distro's though:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/re...rusty/release/