Hello to all I am new to this group and am in need of advice regarding booting a G5 that isn't responding following an attempt to use a firewire enclosure as start up device with a cloned sytem drive.
After cloning drive and checking that it was seen as a start up drive I selected it as boot drive and restarted the mac..... no boot .... just a blank screen .... tried to boot from disk drive by holding down C .... blank screen .... rerun this procedure many times ... no advance on blank screen .... have now replaced hard drive with original drive (came with computer) ....
get flashing ? alternating with mac icon ..... reset pmu ... pulled battery and replaced .... still no progress .... is there a keyboard command to fix this ..... any contribution much appreciated
thanks in advance

First of all, you should verify that the firewire drive is working properly by trying to boot another computer from that drive.

.... tried to boot from disk drive by holding down C ....

That command forces a boot from the CD-ROM only.
* Try holding down the Option/Alt key instead. That should bring up a list of the recognised bootable devices on your system, from which you can choose the external drive.
* Another option: simultaneously press Command+Option+Shift+Delete while booting. This forces the Mac to bypass the internal drive and search for another boot device.

.... have now replaced hard drive with original drive (came with computer) ....
get flashing ? alternating with mac icon...

Please be more clear: You replaced which drive with the "original"? The internal boot drive, or the drive in the firewire enclosure?
The flashing "?" means that the system sees the disk, but can't locate the boot files. Are you positive that this drive is in bootable, working condition?

First of all, you should verify that the firewire drive is working properly by trying to boot another computer from that drive.

That command forces a boot from the CD-ROM only.
* Try holding down the Option/Alt key instead. That should bring up a list of the recognised bootable devices on your system, from which you can choose the external drive.
* Another option: simultaneously press Command+Option+Shift+Delete while booting. This forces the Mac to bypass the internal drive and search for another boot device.

Please be more clear: You replaced which drive with the "original"? The internal boot drive, or the drive in the firewire enclosure?
The flashing "?" means that the system sees the disk, but can't locate the boot files. Are you positive that this drive is in bootable, working condition?

Hi,
thank you for responding to my plea.
just to clarify, I was attempting to boot from CD with C command, I had removed firewire enclosure but with no success I removed the internal HDD (Tiger 10.4.7) replacing it with the HDD that was in the machine when I bought and was working fine when last used
Thanks for the tip on keyboard commands, using the option/alt command resulted in an image of a locked padlock - an open text bar - and an arrow.
I typed tne password into the text bar hit the return key and that was that, nothing more, repeated this many times with no further response.
I do not know for sure that the firewire enclosure works as a boot drive, I assumed that it would be Ok as it worked fine as a back up drive.
Many thanks again

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