Dude, I'm Getting a Mac!

bdgbill · 2007-11-30, 05:21 PM

A friend of mine said he will give me his iMac G5 if I remove the hard drive and give it to him.

This is an all-in-one type machine where everything is built into the monitor. He bought a new machine because this one was malfunctioning.

He said it was taking 10-20 minutes to boot and even then would require multiple re-boots to start up. When it finally started some of the icons were grayed-out and unavailable. Sounds like a sick hard drive or a virus to me.

Has anyone taken one of these things apart? I would not expect removing a hard drive to be difficult but I know diddly squat about Apple.

The machine has a 20 inch LCD. At worst I'm hoping I can somehow use the monitor without the Apple guts.

I'm a little worried about experimenting with Apple products. Will I start wearing Birkenstocks? Will I wake up one morning with dreadlocks? Will I become a Phish fan??

All Hail Maxximum Leader Jobs! What???

nitrogen_widget · 2007-11-30, 06:12 PM

If you can't use the monitor on it's own I would look at http://www.geexbox.com to play media on it.

It boots & runs from CD

bdgbill · 2007-11-30, 09:02 PM

nitrogen_widget Wrote:If you can't use the monitor on it's own I would look at http://www.geexbox.com to play media on it.

It boots & runs from CD

Hmm interesting. If nothing else this will allow me to confirm if the problem he was having with the system was related to the hard disk or not.

The link was broken. The site is here

SuMo · 2007-12-09, 03:43 PM

Hmmm, sounds like a defective logic board to me, it's a common problem with these G5 imacs.
Logic board in apple terms is the same as a mobo in a PC...... yeah I know.... why keep it simple.
Don't worry 'bout birckenstocks though :p

It's a bit PITA to remove the harddrive but doable.

One or two things you can try, when booting keep the apple+alt+P+R keys pressed. You'll hear the apple "boing" sound, keep 'em pressed and it will reboot again. Do this till you've heard the bootboing 5 times. This will "zapp the pram" It's a bit like resetting the bios on a PC.
The next thing you can try if it booted, is under the apple logo (left hand corner) choose software update. With any luck you'll get a firmware update. Make sure you've got network attached (duh Wink

) After installing the given updates keep repeating the software update till nothing shows up anymore.

Good luck on your iMac ! Hope it helps

bdgbill · 2007-12-09, 05:04 PM

Thanks for the good info. Will prob be xmas before I get a chance to mess with it. Work sent me to Pittsburgh for a week Sad

SuMo · 2007-12-09, 07:03 PM

Oh forgot, to see if it's a faulty Harddrive or the mac itself do the following:
Turn machine on
insert OS cd/dvd
hold down "C" until apple logo appears
now it should boot from cd/dvd (if it doesn't leave cd/dvd in and restart while holding down "C")

if this goes pretty smooth then it probably is the Harddrive.
The gray screen with the apple symbol can take a while to dissapear since at this stage all neccesary files are loaded into memory.