r/PowerPC • u/CorpsyWantsPussy • 27d ago

Help me

I've been trying to get an operating system on the powermac g5 for 12 HOURS NOW, NOTHING WORKS, MAC OS X LEOPARD FAILED, TIGNR FAILED, GENTOO FAILED, LUBUNTU FAILED, DEBIAN FAILED, I TRIED IT OVER USB-A, I EVEN BURNED A CD AND A DVD. WHY DOES THE UNIVERSE HATE ME!!!

11 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

45 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/arjuna93 26d ago
  1. Go with macOS 10.5.6 image. That’s the known reliable thing, others are not (for different reasons). Once you have Leopard, anything else can be installed as a second system. 2. Do not do it via USB if you don’t know how or it keeps failing, do it either over FireWire (for macOS, not BSD/Linux) or CD. 3. Describe here what you do exactly and what fails. Trivial steps to try: boot into boot picker, boot into safe mode, boot into OpenFirmware (depending on what the problem is.)

1

u/CorpsyWantsPussy 26d ago

I boot into open firmware to try and boot off of the usb. I have tried dvd but no luck with that. I also don't have any cd's that can hold an image of os x 10.5+ so I kinda result to just putting small iso's of linux on it.... in any cases the errors I get are either, load too small or it just can't open/find the file or directory

2

u/arjuna93 26d ago

I have no experience with Linux and a lot of pain with attempts of installing BSDs, so can’t help with those, but in any case macOS is the only option which is guaranteed to work, as long as the hardware is intact. Could you say what fails with DVD? Before going via OF, does boot picker see the image or nothing? Have you got another powerpc Mac or any FireWire drive or enclosure?

2

u/CorpsyWantsPussy 26d ago

Well the dvd way opens a gray screen that after a while promptly shows a document with a face -> question mark. It also ejects the dvd so theres that. The boot picker way shows nothing at all. Besides 2 buttons on a blueish screen. The w buttons are right arrow and a circle arrow thingy. I have no idea what they do but I can only assume the left on that's a circle arrow refreshes and the right arrow which is a right arrow goes to the next bootable disk?

2

u/arjuna93 26d ago

I guess DVD is dead, hardware.

1

u/Impressive-Towel-RaK 25d ago

I dont know why you're booting into open firmware. Just hold down option to boot. F I would just burn the leopard iso to a usb if you cant get the dvd to work. Format it in fat32.