Formatting the Hard Drive of an Apple G5

By Gemma Craig

The iMac G5 features a PowerPC processor.
i Justin Sullivan/Getty Images News/Getty Images

If your Apple G5's hard drive becomes corrupted, if you want to reinstall the operating system onto a clean drive or if you want to sell the machine without giving away your personal data, you can format the hard drive using the Mac OS installation disc that was included with the iMac. Once formatted, the hard drive will be wiped clean and the computer can be safely sold or discarded, or a fresh copy of the Mac OS can be installed onto the disk without risk of file corruption issues.

Step 1

Insert the Mac OS installation disc that was included with the G5 into its optical drive. If you no longer have the installation disc, you can purchase a new copy from Apple online or from the nearest Apple Store.

Step 2

Restart the iMac. While the device is rebooting, press the "C" key on the keyboard. Click "Install Mac OS X."

Step 3

Click "First Aid," followed by "Disc Utility." From Disk Utility, select "Partition." Select the partition that contains the hard drive's data. Choose "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" from the filesystem options drop-down menu. Click "Partition" and wait for the disc to be formatted.

Step 4

Click "Erase and Install" from the "Erase" tab within Disk Utility instead of following Step 3 if you want to format the entire hard drive instead of just the primary partition where the operating system is contained.

Step 5

Remove the Mac OS installation disc, then press and hold the power button to shut down the iMac.

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