About a month ago an old acquaintance brought me an old (2005) iMac G5Â A1145 for repair. It didn't go past the Apple logo during boot and it's cooling fans were going crazy. After a few failed attempts of booting various Mac OS X installers (both DVD and USB) it became obvious: I have to take the bastard apart.
And by calling it a bastard I'm being soft. Although I wasn't a complete stranger to Apple hardware disassebly (eg. I've had a lot of "fun" removing the top case of my 2008 MacBook), I wasn't exactly prepared to the brainf*ckery I was about to expose myself to.
Thanks to the awesome guys and gals at iFixit.com, there's a very thorough illustrated disassembly guide for the A1145. However I was stuck right after step 5 (removed RAM module), I had no luck opening the two latches holding the front bezel. Turns out that a simple credit card is not exactly the best solution for this, instead you need a special tool shaped like this:
Luckily, I've found this absolutely hilarious and extremely helpful video:
...and 10 minutes and one plastic cookery course later I've turned my old student ID card into an unlicensed Apple Access Card Tool. With it I've opened the latches a minute later. I've followed the guide and removed the HDD (turns out it was dead, crawling with bad sectors) and replaced it.
Since the ODD also turned out to be dead as well and I couldn't replace it (it's not a standard SATA connector drive) and couldn't figure out how to enable USB booting (most forums said it's impossible, but as it later turned out, it's not), it seemed that I have to place the Mac OS X installer on the internal hard drive.
This was tricky, since I couldn't prepare the partition layout (1 partition for the installer, another for the to-be-installed OS X) with my PC, the otherwise awesome Transmac only allows restoring the installer image as is on a drive, and can't handle partitioning tasks. And when I've booted the installer inside the iMac, Disk Utility couldn't create a new partition on the same drive. So I had to use an other Mac's Disk Utility to create the two partitions and restore the installer image on the first one. After that, I was able to succesfully start the Mac OS X installer AND start the installation process.
Unfortunately the proccess failed multiple times with the same error message:
The Installer could not verify the contents of the "AdditionalSpeechVoices" Package
Just my luck. Searching through forums it turned out that multiple people had the same problem and all of them had the same conclusion and solution: the error is related to bad RAM and it needs to be replaced.
Now this particular iMac has a single RAM slot (in which I've had a 1 GB module installed), AND it also has 512 MB of RAM chips soldered to the logic board. So I've removed the 1 GB module, crossed my fingers, re-run the installer, aaaand... it failed again with the same error. I've run a RAM test as well and it confirmed the worst: the integrated RAM chips are bad.
This usually means the end of the adventure. Since that RAM is not replaceable, you can either buy a used logic board from eBay or such, or sell the damn thing for parts. But then I came across this forum post:
May everybody abandon this problem already since it's been long time.
Everytime I install OSX on my iMac G5, I failed because of bad on-board memory.
But I have come to conclusion.
Like some Brazilian guy said, I just removed RAM chip with flat-head screw driver by force one by one.
Then every thing fine except I lost 512MB of memory.
But lot better than buy logic board way more expensive than $500.
Right after that I ordered 2GB memory chip by $30.
How's that?
I'm very satisfied.
Now that's something that would probably upset the stomach of MacGyver even. Popping off RAM chips with a freaking flat head screwdriver from a fragile logic board one by one? Yeah, why not. Worst case scenario that I do more damage to an already screwed logic board.
"Oh Yeah, Look at Those Dead Bastards"
It was a mess, but it freaking worked. Although as an experiment I ended up installing the PPC build of Debian on the machine instead of Leopard. Because after all that hardware misery I was looking for a little software misery for a change :) but more on that later (maybe)...