Alright, part 3 is here! What you're about to read occurred shortly after disaster struck my PowerMac G5, and it only gets worse from here. As I revealed in part 2, I had a SATA-3 cable lying around, but as you will see by the end, it seemingly proved to NOT be compatible with the PowerMac G5, so I went ahead and ordered TWO SATA data cables that claimed compatibility with the SATA-1 protocol just to be on the safe side. As I am writing this, they are not yet in my possession.
I retrieved a spare SATA-3 cable hoping that this would solve my problems. It is totally frustrating that I even have to do this, since the Apple-supplied cable got toasted and trying to replace it is a pain as any of you who have done any extensive tinkering with the PowerMac G5 should know by now. Apple uses two L-shaped SATA data cables, both of which are awkwardly routed through a small slit in the metallic chassis. The official Apple service manual for the PowerMac G5, starting on page 30, actually demonstrates how to replace one of these cables and recommends using a wire cutter to snip the head off of one end of the cable before pulling it out. Since the cable itself was done for, I had no qualms with demolishing it in the way Apple suggests, so out it went. In its place was my random SATA-3 cable. The leftmost SATA port above the PCIe slots on the motherboard is for the bottom drive and the rightmost port is for the top drive.
You can read or download the useful manual at this link:
http://tim.id.au/laptops/apple/powermac/powermac_g5.pdf.
Thankfully, my cable had a straight-end and an L-shaped end instead of both ends being L-shaped, so I didn't have to fumble about trying to squeeze my hands inside the chassis doing some reach around maneuver ton plug it in through a relatively tiny slit. It wasn't all sunshine and rainbows, however, as this cable had clips on each end to secure it in place once connected, so I still had to use two hands to hold the cable by the sides and use my other hand to push down the security lock. One hand is not given enough clearance to be able to push in the cable and secure it at the same time. As I'm sure you're all aware, the heads aren't reversible; they only plug in one way.
You say, "how does the cable get to the other side to plug in to your drive of choice?" Well, conveniently, there is enough room for the cable to just go around the chassis and make its way to the drive bays without having to go through the tiny slit that Apple wants you to use. Here is a picture demonstrating the "technique", if you could even call it that:
So, this should be the end of my troubles, right? WRONG! Disk Utility shows nothing added and System Profiler shows the drive does not exist. Believe me, I was beginning to lose my patience. It was time to diagnose the issues and troubleshoot.
I can't use the PowerMac G5 to get the drive to be recognized, so I used a USB drive enclosure and plugged that in to my M1 Mac Mini.
Well, would you look at that! The drive was recognized! It just works™! The moment it was plugged in, I was prompted with a dialogue box asking me if I would like to initialize the drive in Disk Utility, which is what every Mac does when any new drive is plugged in to it. So, I went ahead and formatted the SSD with Apple Partition Map, which is the correct course of action when dealing with PowerPC Macs instead of formatting the drive with GUID partition map scheme. I wish I wasn't forced to do this on a modern Mac, but when push comes to shove...
Okay, now I plugged the USB cable into my PowerMac G5 with the SSD inside the adapter and inside the external enclosure. (pictured off-camera to the left where the USB cable is on my carpet) I booted into Mac OS X and checked Disk Utility and System Profiler again. Neither show that the SSD exists. Power is being delivered to the drive since the enclosure relies on an external power brick, but the PowerMac G5 sees absolutely nothing. The below picture is me after turning off the PowerMac and taking apart the enclosure and brainstorming to myself:
So, I was running out of options. Then, it hit me. This was my last resort. If this didn't work out, then I was out of luck. I figured that the SATA bridge on the adapter was the culprit as to why the newly formatted SSD was STILL not being recognized no matter what way I plug it in to the PowerMac G5. After all, it was recognized just fine on my newer Mac Mini. Thus, I unscrewed the SSD from the 2.5-inch-to-3.5-inch adapter and plugged it in to the USB enclosure.
Now, isn't that interesting? The drive mounted to the desktop and was recognized by Disk Utility. So, let me get this straight. The SATA bridge on the adapter was too new for the PowerMac G5 to recognize the SSD it was connected to? Did I take for granted that the adapter would be as compatible with PowerPC Macs as I did the SSD considering OWC bundles the two products together on their website? What a headache this had all been, but my perseverance and my problem-solving skills have broken boundaries thus far and once again propel me past another hurdle!
Just out of curiosity, I unmounted the OWC SSD and plugged in an ADATA-branded SSD to the drive enclosure to see if Mac OS X would recognize it. Nope, it did not.
I could finally continue with what I should have been doing had the Apple-supplied SATA data cable not been ruined. I set out to use Disk Utility to restore 10.5.9 "Sorbet Leopard" to the SSD. I know the official installation guide calls for using Carbon Copy Cloner, but I had seen Disk Utility successfully be used in its place before and knew that Disk Utility had no problem creating bootable drives with official versions of OS X like Tiger or Panther on separate partitions, so I thought it wouldn't be an issue. After all, it's really straightforward as you can see in my photograph below:
In TextEdit above, I claimed that the 3.5-inch-to-2.5-inch adapter was what had prohibited it from being recognized by the PowerMac G5 after being plugged in to it via my random SATA-3 cable, but it actually ended up being something else in tandem with that, supposedly. Not only was it that adapter, but I believe also the SATA-3 cable itself, since it seemingly wasn't backwards compatible with SATA-1, as you will soon see. Disk Utility reported that the restoration would take around 30 minutes, so I left the room to go relax. Part 2 and Part 3 took place on the same afternoon, and it was now evening.
Forgive my understandable lethargy that night, but I made the mistake of forgetting that Mac OS X by default puts the computer to sleep after less than 15 minutes of inactivity, so Disk Utility's restoration got interrupted and failed. I always change that setting on all of my Macs, so after a few hours of work this fact had slipped my mind. That should have been the sign to take a break and resign to another day, but I'm the type to try to finish something I set my mind to in one sitting, otherwise it gains the risk of being put on the proverbial shelf collecting dust. I wrote a message in TextEdit in the below photograph after I had returned to the PowerMac. I heard the fans from all the way across the house, to give you an idea of how loud it can get in case you've never owned a PowerMac G5, but the noise this machine generates is probably not lost on any of you here.
I don't know whether Disk Utility genuinely failed to restore Sorbet Leopard to the SSD or if it's because the Mac going to sleep cancelled the restoration since I wasn't present to actually see either event happen. Just in case the former was true, I installed Carbon Copy Cloner and used it to restore Sorbet Leopard to the SSD.
I'll let my TextEdit note in the following photo do the talking for me. Just a heads up to any one out there who doesn't know this: PowerPC Macs can boot from an external FireWire drive, but NOT from an external USB drive, OpenFirmware hackery notwithstanding. Carbon Copy Cloner completed the restoration and my SSD should now have a bootable partition of Sorbet Leopard installed to it. What a relief! All I have to do now is remove the SSD from the USB enclosure, unplug the PowerMac G5, open the side panel, and plug in the SSD using my random SATA-3 cable, right?
Well, here it is! It's plugged in, but no dice. It not only did not appear in the boot-picker after I started the Mac holding the Alt/Option key, but Mac OS X does not recognize anything is plugged in via Disk Utility nor System Profiler. This SATA-3 cable is NOT backwards-compatible with SATA-1. As mentioned earlier, I purchased two cables that claimed compatibility with SATA-1 and SATA-2 and that had user reviews supposedly confirming this as well. As of this writing, I am currently waiting for those two to arrive. This whole ordeal has been quite the journey, I must say. I will try my hand at this again when at least one of those cables are in my possession.
As a semi-related side-note, there's a whole lot of misinformation and lack of information online regarding hardware (and possibly even more so software) compatibility that leaves tinkerers like us with doing literal guess work to see what actually works with our old devices. It's fun when you find something that works when it wasn't reported to, but frustrating when you find something that doesn't, especially if it was purported to be.
