Evening,

So my PowerMac G5 seems to have finally packed up. I can't get past the grey Apple screen, there's never a chime, I've replaced the 3.6V battery reset everything the internet tells me too and there's a rather ominous looking red LED shining when I look through the grill at the front.

Unless anyone has any bright ideas that could fix my predicament, what are my options? Obviously all of the software I had installed won't work on any new machine I buy (due to the PPC nature of the G5) so I need to update all of that as well as buying a new machine. I'm sure this question has been asked many times before, but:

What would be the best option for a new machine and software (Logic, Mach5, Ivory, Sample Libraries etc) and what sort of ballpark figure would I be looking at?

Many, many thanks in advance

T-Man

You could try Apple's refurb site, get the cheapest MacPro. Hopefully it will be old enough to run Snow Leopard. That might run most of your software?

For a short term fix, you could buy refurb G5 and swap out the HD's.Mac King have some for a couple of hundred.

otherwise, a Mac Mini is probably your most cost effective new buy option.For a dual HD server model, you're looking at the best part of £1K + your third party software update expenses.

The quick fix sounds like a very workable solution. Would there be any issues putting hard drives from a 2.5ghz dual core system into a 2ghz dual core system? I guess I could swap over RAM as well? Would there be any other issues to look out for?


Thanks again for all your help

T-Man

All G5s take standard SATA disks so you can swap the disks over. As do MacPros - you can take disks of content from G5 to MacPro.

My g5 bit the dust last summer and I got an imac with a 3.4 i7 processor and an ssd. i really thought I liked my g5 powermac until I got this thing. You'll never look back. Using migration assistant, much of your software will work. It's still osX. You may have to re-license some plugins. Pull your drive(s) out of your old machine and put in enclosures and migrate to you new machine. For a day or so of hassle you'll be happier than ever.

Edited by frontandcenter (23/02/12 02:28 AM)

The red light might indicate a hardware fault or something as simple as the air deflector out of place.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2652

The start up disk is might be the problem, so unless you can fix the disk, you might not get back the information on it.

I would suggest Disk Warrior to check the integrity of the disk you have. It might not fix it permanently, but I have used it to fix registry errors allowing me to get back data. It isn't the cheapest program, but it is a very good utility to have around.

http://www.alsoft.com/diskwarrior/

Still it is possible a good excuse to get a newer Mac.

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http://soundcloud.com/richie-royale
http://www.mixcrate.com/richieroyale

Thank you all for all of your replies. The job I have on at the moment just requires composing on Sibelius (which I'm able to do on my MacBook Pro) so the "bricked" PowerMac is sat gathering dust in the corner.

I've been looking into options going forward and wondered if you would indulge me picking your brains a bit more (again, apologies if this has been covered in the past in other threads). How would one of the new iMacs compare to my decrepit G5?


Cheers,

T-Man

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/music-computers/371545-logic-pro-multicore- benchmarktest.html

This should give you some idea of what to expect.

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http://soundcloud.com/richie-royale
http://www.mixcrate.com/richieroyale

I have a nice horror story about a friend who bought a "refurb" ( yeah right ! ) G5 from the company named above.
Can't say I'd recommend them.

The quad i7 imac is a true beast, being twice as fast as the original quad Mac Pro.
Buy one.
Put 8gb in it and love it.

put simply, they are brilliant.

Quote Scope:

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I have a nice horror story about a friend who bought a "refurb" ( yeah right ! ) G5 from the company named above.
Can't say I'd recommend them.

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You mean Apple's own refurb site?
Over the years I've had a 12" G4 powerbook, G5 Powermac, macbook, Macpro, 2 iPods and an iMac from there, never had any trouble, All the puter's worked out of the box, and they are all still working - even the old G4 powerbook! All came with proper software and new keyboards and mice.
Mates in work have done the same with no hassle.
They come with a years warranty.
I've no intention of buying another mac anytime soon, but when I do the refurb site is where I'll be heading!

Obviously YMMV.

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Cubase, guitars.

Our 2004 g5 went down this year. a friends gave way a few months later.
Of our own It was a strange event of random symptoms with the ram slots. Numerous failures. I am pretty convinced that the issue was with dry solder on the memory controller.
My friend on the other hand had one of his dual cpu's vanish.
From what I've read on the web, G5's may have an issue with dry solder and I could imagine a number of people will begin to experiance failure as time goes by.
I know there is a German company that will repair such faults but at quite some expense.
The old trick of a hair drier on the circuit board has been mentioned a number of times but only as a quick lucky fix.
We picked up a replacement second hand G5 for about £150 for legacy reasons .
Still its a worry it could fail through the same process.

Morning!

Thank you so much for all of your help. Just a little update to this. I replaced my PowerMac with a refurb iMac which is proving to be an amazing machine. I wanted to get access to the hard-drives of the old G5 and read about the hairdryer trick that might work to reinvigorate dried solder joints. I decided to have a go so plugged my PowerMac into a monitor and powered it up to see how many times the light blinked....... What do you know? The fans went crazy and the thing powered up. The fans were running at full pelt (very noisy and far more than I remembered them doing in the past) but otherwise it seemed ok. I plugged a mouse and keyboard to start navigating around to see what I could start salvaging and all of a sudden the fans stopped and the screen went blank. The white light by the power button was still lit. I clicked the mouse and the screen came to life again and the fans went wild. After about 30 seconds this happened again. I continued this for about 5 minutes then thought I should seek some advice, so I shut down the system. Even this stalled and sent the machine to sleep - the screen was blank, the fans were off but the white power light was still on. I clicked the mouse and screen came on with just my desktop picture and the G5 complete shut down....


I have now tried to restart it, and no fan noise, nothing on the screen and through the grill at the front I can see the ominous glowing of a red LED way back in the machine.

So near, and yet so far!!!

T-Man

My condolences.

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PolycorpMedia
ProTools HD10 / 24ch Lynx Aurora / API / SSL / A-Designs / TK-Audio / SPL / Raindirk / Hearback

External Mounting ?

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2199327?threadID=2199327

Doh.... I see you've done this already

My G5 Quad had the same problems, I thought it had passed away. Right now I'm typing this on it:-)
I guess your G5 has dry soldier points.
I got this tip for my G5: get the service manual (internet), take the logic board out and put it in an oven (190 C/ 15 min). Make sure to place it horizontal so the soldier can reflow the correct way.
I took the risk of grilling my Mac (it didn't work anyway, so things couldn't get much worse) and it's still working (3 months, no problems whatsoever).