Ask Jacob

The G5 PowerMac, supports OS X up to 10.5.8, with support for Classic (OS 9 virtualized). Partitioning the drive, most likely will just limit your storage options, as that unit will not boot in OS 9. I hope this information has been useful for you.

Dennis Beaman
PowerMax Support

What a nice gift! 10.4.11 has been a really good system, but is beginning to lose some support from newer software. 10.5 shouldn’t be much slower, unless there are underlying issues. How much RAM do you have? Do you have one, or two internal drives? What kinds of software do you plan on using with this G5? These are all questions that must be considered when it comes to performance and compatibility.

- Dennis

Are you sure that you have the original install DVDs for your system? Most gray labeled discs are locked to the exact generation computer that they shipped with.

Most Dual 2.7 G5s shipped with 10.4.0 and did not have 10.4.2 DVDs. Those 10.4.2 DVDs were included in the generation after that model. However, if you are sure that they work on your G5, It may just be a problem with the destination drive. If you have a second internal drive you could experiment with, try installing 10.4.2 on that drive.

Then use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone that fresh install onto your external hard drive. Dont forget to format the External Drive as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume with a Apple Partition Map. Those are often the default settings when using Disk Utility to partition a drive.

Jacob

Have you tried updating to 10.5.8, just to see if that fixes the issue? Beyond that, you should see if the camera shows up in other applications. For instance, on Apple computers the iChat application lets you use FireWire camcorders as an iSight camera.

Open iChat and see if the Video/Audio tab shows the camera as a functioning source. If it is working in iChat, then the camera is fine and you need to focus on the software you are using to edit it. Are you using iMovie or another program? It could be that any none Apple software did not get updated to work with newer versions of the Mac OS. In that case you may want to update that software or switch to iMovie.

Hope that helps,
Jacob

There are two common ways of capturing your screen. First you can use the keyboard shortcuts bellow

• Shift-Command-3 = Capture the screen to a file
• Shift-Control-Command-3 = Capture the screen to the Clipboard
• Shift-Command-4 = Capture a selection to a file
• Shift-Control-Command-4 = Capture a selection to the Clipboard

Be sure to check out Apple’s full list of Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts.

The other way to capture your screen is with the Grab utility in your Applications/Utilities folder. This application is included with every Mac and it gives you more options when trying to get exactly the screen image you want than you have with the keyboard shortcuts.

Hope that helps,
- Jacob

You can run the older 10.4 Mac OS on a partition of the drive if that computer originally was capable of running that OS. So if you have version of 10.4 that came with that iMac G5, you can install that on a partition or external hard drive. Then you just need to install Classic OS 9 support and you should be set.

I do this on a few test systems here, and have no problem bouncing from 10.4 to 10.5. Just use the Startup Disk System Preference to change which partition you want the Mac to boot from and restart.

Hope that helps,
- Jacob

Getting a Dual boot system out of that hardware will not be possible. The Mac OS needs to run on Apple hardware or the brave can attempt to build a “Hackintosh” but you need to have a system with a compatible Intel based processor.

Even If you were to buy a Mac to run the Mac OS and Windows on the same system, you would have to run Windows XP SP2 or higher alongside the Mac OS. Hope that helps answer your question, new hardware and Windows software is the only way to dual boot.

- Jacob