Installing Leopard (OS 10.5) on iMac G5

I have tried several times to upgrade the operating system on a G5 iMac but have been unsuccessful. I am using the retail family pack DVD, have removed all peripherals except for keyboard and mouse, but cannot get further than attempting to reboot from the DVD. It starts to load but gets hung up on the spinning little spoke-like wheel thing on the gray background, which spins endlessly until I turn the power off. I have tried using my other iMac as an external drive with a Firewire in the target-host mode but get the same result. Any suggestions are welcomed!

1. Unless you have a family pack, you shouldn't use the same disc on more than one Mac.
2. If your Mac has a drive issue with its optical drive, and is a G5, you will need a Firewire DVD drive to load Leopard.
3. An iMac G5 will not boot from any system specific disc for any other Mac.
4. 'C' key is not reliable for booting. Try the Startup Manager, if you believe your optical drive should work. That's described here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TA27043?viewlocale=en_US
Only you'd select the Leopard installer disc, and not the hardware test.
5. If your iMac has 10.4.11, and you are upgrading, be sure to follow these steps to upgrade*:
http://www.macmaps.com/upgradefaq.html
6. Target Disk Mode installs only work between similar models and vintage Macs:
An iMac G5 can't install to an iMac Intel. Only an iMac G5 from August 2005 will install to another iMac G5 from August 2005.
For more on installing to broken optical drives, see this article:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1418365&tstart=0
7. Before assuming your drive is broken, if it is more than 4 years old, you may need to replace the clock battery. After which point you may need to zap your PRAM:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379?viewlocale=en_US
8. Finally be sure to identify your iMac correctly here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1463?viewlocale=en_US
- * Links to my pages may give me compensation.

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  • How to install leopard on iMac g5 questions?

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