G5 Won't Reboot Since WD Caviar Installation

Question

I bought a WD Caviar Green 1 TB internal drive and installed it myself. I followed every step, carefully installed the drive, discharged static, etc., and turned on the computer. The fans kicked in like crazy and I got the ? of Death. Long story short: I got on the phone with WD and did what they told me to do. Got the ? of Death again. I removed the drive - ? folder again. Took the computer to Best Buy where I bought the drive. Geek Squad couldn't fix it. Got out the Tiger install disk out and tried to repair the disk with Disk Utility. Results: it failed to repair every time - said "1 Volume" would not repair. Reset the PRAM - nada. Now it's refusing to even eject the Tiger install disk!
Before I bought the WD internal drive, I never had a single problem with this Mac - never. It has worked flawlessly - and I only use it for film. Anybody have any suggestions on how to get it to reboot again from the original HD?

Answer 1

Hi there!
I've revised about 15 minutes of a reply to your topic...
and deleted it all. So, I've been at this awhile. A few
ideas have been repeated in my post now as before.
Since there is no way to tell what was/n't done to the computer
you have, or the replacement hard disk drive to prepare it for
use in the computer you have, this is all guess work & tedium.
The hard disk drive may have the jumper pins incorrectly set
for use in your computer's configuration. That needs to be
checked to be sure; and since the new drive is already in the
Mac, that makes this harder. And, since there may be some
other issue wrong with the computer, other than the original
hard disk drive's failure (due to untold circumstances & age)
that matter is a secondary one as the hard disk drive should
still be replaced as part of a troubleshooting effort in the Mac.
An externally enclosed hard drive in FireWire enclosure, that
is capable of booting the Mac with OS X cloned or installed
on to it, is an ideal tool not only for backups and extra storage
but also to use as a test bed to see if the computer itself is OK.
Clone utilities can be downloaded & run for free to help do the
job of routine clones for backup and also for home tech repair.
I'd have not done business with Best Buy; they seem to have
a few things on sale and most stuff is only for sale. Retail. A
few of their techs may be interested in repairing old computers
but in several locations personal friends have been to, their
sales and tech staff is geared to selling or servicing only newer
hardware that they have recently sold; or mostly PCs & not Mac.
Western Digital (WD) hard disk drives, while they have improved
vastly from their clumsy and messy wake of destruction in some
older Macs with different architecture, would not be my first choice.
Since your G5 probably has SATA (serial ATA) hard disk drives,
the WD brand has vastly improved for newer hardware & SATA.
But I'd choose Hitachi, Toshiba, Seagate/Maxtor and others.
The jumper pins may be part of the problem.
And with the old drive, perhaps Disk Warrior could have rebuilt a
damaged directory in there; and if any excess content on the drive
were removed and plenty of free space for the OS X and Apps to
run was assured, perhaps the drive would work again for awhile.
It may also be, that the drive would need to be totally erased and
overwritten (secure erase) so as to zero the content and then a
reformat; then reinstall from scratch a whole new system, on it.
The paths to do that now are not so direct; since the repair to
the old drive could have been tried while it was in the computer
-or done if it had been put into an external FW enclosure and
later attended to via Disk Warrior or Drive Genius; after the Mac
had seen a new hard disk drive installed.
Since the original drive probably failed due to use, age and also
perhaps having been run too full of content, getting info off it may
be a worthy task. That can be done via an enclosure, so it can
be seen as just an external non-bootable drive, & files removed.
Well, I am not sure of a simple path now, but since I have the tools
at home to do the jobs I am referring to, the problem isn't mine.
PS: There also is a small chance you may have gotten a bad HDD.
Good luck & happy computing!
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