Having trouble installing 10.5 on xserve g5

Question

Hello,
I recently purchased an Xserve G5 from an auction site. It is a single processor 2.0ghz PPC moel with no graphics card and a CD drive and did not come with an installation CD for mac os server. Herein lies the problem...
I have a Mac OSX Server 10.5 installation DVD (which should run on this xserve) but since it is a DVD I can't just put it in and boot from it. I have tried a great number of things to get the server to boot but nothing so far has worked. Here's what I tried:
1) Making an image of the DVD and putting it on an external firewire hard drive with apple partition map. Then connecting it to the FW400 port on the front of the xserve and setting the xserve to boot from any available disk (also tried holding T on a keyboard and every other option to boot it). It simply doesn't boot it for whatever reason.
2) Making a Netboot and Netinstall images from the disk image and running that from another 10.5 server with the xserve put into netboot mode. This gave me the most success with the following log:
Jun 30 01:14:13 vels bootpd[4770]: server starting
Jun 30 01:14:13 vels bootpd[4770]: can't open /etc/bootptab
Jun 30 01:14:13 vels bootpd[4770]: server name vels.private
Jun 30 01:14:13 vels bootpd[4770]: interface en0: ip 192.168.1.66 mask 255.255.255.0
Jun 30 01:14:13 vels bootpd[4770]: bsdpd: re-reading configuration
Jun 30 01:14:13 vels bootpd[4770]: bsdpd: shadow file size will be set to 48 megabytes
Jun 30 01:14:13 vels bootpd[4770]: bsdpd: age time 00:15:00
Jun 30 01:14:13 vels bootpd[4770]: BSDP DISCOVER [en0] 1,0:d:93:9c:d:6 arch=ppc sysid=RackMac3,1
Jun 30 01:14:13 vels bootpd[4770]: service time 0.000120 seconds
Jun 30 01:14:13 vels bootpd[4770]: NetBoot: parse vendor specific options failed, missing vendor specific options
Jun 30 01:14:13 vels bootpd[4770]: service time 0.000065 seconds
Jun 30 01:14:26 vels bootpd[4770]: BSDP INFORM [en0] 1,0:d:93:9c:d:6 arch=ppc sysid=RackMac3,1
Jun 30 01:14:26 vels bootpd[4770]: NetBoot: [1,0:d:93:9c:d:6] BSDP ACK[LIST] sent 192.168.1.69 pktsize 300
This tells me the xserve is accepting an IP address and identifying itself as a Rackmac3,1 but just isn't booting.
I have no reason to believe the hardware is faulty as it was simply retired from a graphics studio and was fully working. It also shows no problems with the lights on the front and from the above log seems to do functions that it should.
What can I do now? The only option I see is to hunt down a PCI graphics card to see what it's problem is as I am a bit lost now as to why it's not working.

Answer 1

I have but I did some research and I don't think the G5 boots from USB, only Intel Xserves can.
Could it be my image?
One interesting thing I noticed was that when I made the netboot image in the .nbi folder that is made, there is a NBImageInfo.plist file. In this file it has:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Architectures</key>
<array>
<string>ppc</string>
<string>i386</string>
</array>
<key>BackwardCompatible</key>
<false/>
<key>BootFile</key>
<string>booter</string>
<key>Description</key>
<string>NetBoot of Mac OS X Server 10.5 (9A581) Install.</string>
<key>DisabledSystemIdentifiers</key>
<array>
<string>PowerMac4,2</string>
<string>PowerMac4,5</string>
<string>PowerMac6,1</string>
<string>PowerMac6,3</string>
<string>RackMac3,1</string>
</array>
<key>EnabledSystemIdentifiers</key>
<array/>
<key>Index</key>
<integer>329</integer>
<key>IsDefault</key>
<false/>
<key>IsEnabled</key>
<false/>
<key>IsInstall</key>
<false/>
<key>Kind</key>
<integer>2</integer>
<key>Language</key>
<string>Default</string>
<key>Name</key>
<string>NetBoot of Mac OS X Server Install Disc</string>
<key>RootPath</key>
<string>NetBoot.dmg</string>
<key>SupportsDiskless</key>
<false/>
<key>Type</key>
<string>NFS</string>
<key>osVersion</key>
<string>10.5</string>
</dict>
</plist>
Seeing as my xserve is rackmac3,1 it appears it is in the disabled list. I tried removing it from the list and refreshing the netboot process but it didn't help. Could it be my version of 10.5 is somehow not able to boot on an xserve g5? I don't see how this could be the case as it should work...