Chosen Solution
I picked up this powermac from a recycler with no ram - harddrive - or optical drive. The plexi airsheild was missing so i have a piece of reflective material stuck in the hole temporarily to fool the sensor and turn the red LED off. I put a PC IDE cable and drive in to try and install Leopard to 500 gb sata hd that was lating around but when the drives are connected i only boot to the blank white screen and it will just sit there and the fans throttle up after a while. With the drives disconnected I get a bluish screen with the finder / ? box in the center. I booted it via firewire connected to an iMac in target mode and it runs the OS. I have tried different jumper setting on the dvd drive and i was thinking that it may be something with the standard dual head IDE cable that i am using. I have also tried the smu and pram reset and can not get it to boot into open firmware by holding OPT - O -F .Any ideas?
try connecting the drive you want to boot from and holding opt when you turn on. This will give you all the available boot options
I’m a little confused about your drive hookup. You have a SATA drive connected with an IDE cable? Please confirm the hard drive is connected properly. Ralph
The DVD drive is connected via IDE and the harddrive via sata just like it came. I had to use a dual IDE cable from a pc because the mac one was missing. I know the newer IDE cables are different than really old ones and thought that could possibly be an issue
Hold down C key on start up then after startup go to utilities and format the new drive. This will allow you to install your software
