Imac g5 with no OS nor CD drive

Posted by sinekonata on Super User See other posts from Super User or by sinekonata
Published on 2012-06-12T16:00:23Z Indexed on 2012/06/12 16:42 UTC
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What I want:

  • Ubuntu on a g5 Imac.

What I have:

  • An empty PC (Intel g5 17" Imac) with broken CD drive. Its model is A1173.
  • This PC with Ubuntu 12.04 and an old Vista partition.
  • a usb flash drive.

Problems:

  • No CD means the only boot Drive I could use is USB.
  • There are no BIOS on Macs so I can't set boot settings or even see if it detects my USB drive. When I start the machine and press ALT the first and only thing I see is an old corrupted winXP partition and not a single option or additional information.
  • So assuming blindly that the Mac hardware/firmware works normally, I don't have any Mac OS to use any of the tools that I found on different tutorials for building a bootable .img drive for macs.
  • I can't find much software on Linux/Windows to substitute to those tools, for example among others converting an .iso file (win/linux) to .img (mac I guess). Which makes me think that the scenario where someone like me has Mac hardware but no Mac OS is extremely rare.
  • So other than finding someone that has a Mac I have no solution. So I ask what would you do? the only thing is it should not involve any money (I know mac soft is rarely free) which also excludes getting any MacOS unless I can use a free macos.img for VM or restore the original Mac for free.

Thank you

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