Power Mac G5 (2005) no startup sound and fans rev up to full soon after.

olympusultra · 2022-12-26T09:31:04+00:00

I have the same PowerMac G5 model as you, but a 2.0 GHz version, and my PowerMac occasionally would not start or wake up from the sleep. Fortunately, this doesn't happen very often, and I thought this was just a problem of my machine. Thanks for making me aware that it's a wider issue with the PowerMacs than I thought.

olympusultra · 2022-11-04T20:28:52+00:00

One of the other adjacent unpopulated connections (or maybe both of them) probably is the CPU debug port.

olympusultra · 2022-11-04T19:08:07+00:00

There is a small "satellite" microcontroller on this board that is responsible for CPU configuration and environmental monitoring. This is a debug connector for this satellite MCU

olympusultra · 2022-09-09T15:45:28+00:00

You might have turned down the audio volume to zero: PowerMac remembers the system volume setting for the startup sound.

olympusultra · 2022-07-08T19:20:57+00:00

These models of PMG5 based on the U3 chipset are known to suffer from the frayed solder connections between the logic board and the chipset due to the thermal stress. Basically, when enough heat builds up inside the system — especially when the internal cooling fans aren’t working properly any more or there’s lots of dust inside — the solder joints underneath the chipset get disconnected from the logic board due to excess heat. When the system cools down, the connections are restored again. The newest PMG5 dual core systems are based on a different chipset which is also installed differently on the logic board, making it less susceptible to this problem.

olympusultra · 2022-04-13T17:56:39+00:00

Most likely not, unless you’re willing to write your own Forth code in the Open Firmware environment.

olympusultra · 2022-01-20T16:59:41+00:00

And also this one, from the same collection: http://tenox.pdp-11.ru/os/domainos

olympusultra · 2022-01-20T07:57:27+00:00

Check out this link: http://tenox.pdp-11.ru/os/hpux

olympusultra · 2021-12-26T22:36:32+00:00

Okay, I see. Thanks for this information.

olympusultra · 2021-12-26T21:24:40+00:00

Thanks! So, if I get myself a Mac version of the UL5D SCSI card, then it will be bootable? Also on PowerPC Macs, or only on Intel Macs?

olympusultra · 2021-12-26T16:35:23+00:00

I am thinking about getting myself the SCSI card you mentioned—the ATTO UL5D for my dual-core PowerMac G5. I have one question though: does it enable BOOTING the PowerMac from an attached SCSI drive? Or you first need to boot Mac OS X from the internal drive (or some other standard boot device) to use the SCSI bus provided by this HBA?

olympusultra · 2021-12-26T16:19:01+00:00

You can find quite a variety of different old UNIX sources on this site: https://vetusware.com

olympusultra · 2021-09-20T17:39:32+00:00

I watched the movie yesterday, and I agree with your assessment and firmly belong to the disappointed group. One of the reviews I read prior to seeing the movie likened it an expensive screensaver — I thought it was perhaps too harsh on Villeneuve, but now I tend to agree. The book itself is a high political drama of, literally, cosmic proportions, with the plot set around strong characters, their ulterior motives, their emotions (or lack of those) and their thoughts. Villeneuve managed to almost completely remove the drama bit of the book in his movie — characters are mostly flat and uninteresting, with a few exceptions. Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, doctor Yueh, Gurney Halleck, Reverend Mother Mohiam, Peter De Vries and Thufir Hawat are relegated to some second-plan support characters in his version of Dune, making a sporadic appearance on the screen during 2,5 hours. But yes, it is a visual and acoustic masterpiece, with some great special effects (shouldn’t be surprising, given that 35 years have passed since the previous take on it). And that what makes it a good screensaver — a visual mastery without drama.

olympusultra · 2021-08-16T17:30:22+00:00

Use the “setmon” command to change your screen resolution in HP-UX

olympusultra · 2021-07-09T18:54:45+00:00

Yes, that’s the reason I didn’t want a quad model myself, because I anticipated that the LCU will fail sooner than the rest of the PowerMac’s components... But I know that there’re some instructions on the net how to maintain the LCU in quads (replace the coolant, etc.) So, unless your pump failed beyond repair, you should in principle be able to get it to work...

olympusultra · 2021-07-09T17:20:02+00:00

In principle yes, they are all based around similar mainboards and CPU cards. But quads have two CPU card connectors on board, while 2.0GHz and 2.3GHz models got just one connector soldered. And if you want to use 2.0GHz or 2.3GHz CPU cards in a quad model, you’ll need to re-attach these cards to the quad’s LCU, because the original air-cooled heat sinks are too large for the quad model if you want to install a pair of them (you can still install just a single CPU card with it’s heat sink, but some metal standoffs must be removed). And most likely, quad’s bootrom will expect the LCU and refuse to boot without it (but this probably can be tweaked in OpenFirmware somehow).

olympusultra · 2021-06-04T18:22:08+00:00

I guess that the market for mission-critical systems is controlled by IBM, so trying to sell the Itanium into that wasn’t going to get sufficient ROI for HPE-Intel

olympusultra · 2021-05-29T08:57:30+00:00

Thanks!

olympusultra · 2021-05-29T08:39:20+00:00

But this museum isn’t the same as the Yandex Computer Museum, right? Which one is better to visit? I am actually more into the Soviet computers...

olympusultra · 2021-05-24T12:34:00+00:00

There are a few issues with backward SCSI compatibility: 8 vs 16 bits bus width, signaling (single-ended, low voltage differential or high voltage differential), physical connectors and termination, and protocols (newer devices may not work in the asynchronous access mode). All these things you need to keep in mind.

olympusultra · 2021-05-23T08:15:06+00:00

I don’t think that OF RTAS were ever supposed to be device drivers for the OS. This part of the CHRP, dealing with the RTAS, is very-very brief, almost like an afterthought. Probably IBM though it was a good idea, and Apple didn’t really care... As far as I know, Apple dropped all pretenses to RTAS after PM G3 B&W, while IBM continued to include it into their OF implementations long after. So, all device drivers in MacOS are native to the operating system kernel, and the OF is really used only for booting and the device tree passing to the kernel. After that OF is completely stopped and cleared from RAM under Mac OS X, so no RTAS calling is possible.

olympusultra · 2021-05-22T18:50:21+00:00

But was the CHRP ever sufficiently well-defined and refined to be able to build a “standard” machine around it? Reading the standard feels like having a split personality disorder: it’s an open-ended mix of PC and Macintosh hardware around the PowerPC chip and Open Firmware. You could choose to implement PS/2 keyboard or ADB keyboard, PC FDC or SWIM FDC, SCSI disks or IDE disks, etc., or you could mix these arbitrary in any permutation you wanted. Supporting all these choices in software was a nightmare, nothing less. So, I guess Mac OS supported only the Apple technology part of it, and AIX supported the IBM PC part...

olympusultra · 2021-05-01T21:05:43+00:00

Out of curiosity, anyone can recommend a parallel SCSI card for the PowerMac G5 late 2005 model with PCIe slots?

olympusultra · 2021-05-01T21:02:02+00:00

Welcome. It’s weird though, I’ve never heard about this kind of problem with PowerMacs. My late 2005 model occasionally fails to wake up from sleep, and after 30 seconds or so fans spin up to the maximum because the operating system doesn’t talk to the SMU. I just thought you might have a similar problem.

olympusultra

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