Chosen Solution

In a nutshell: I bought a Power Mac G5, I believe 2.3 GHz. 160 HDD, with 8 GB of RAM. I got it at a thrift store. Password locked on screen. Couldn’t boot single user, from external, nothing. Also reseting PRAM was a failure. Thought well I have TransMac software and USB drives. From a Windows system I booted up the system. Under Windows CMD I cleaned & converted as well as created a primary partition in GPT instead of MBR. Restored an image of OS-X Lion onto a thumb drive. I then reformatted the HDD. (I’m at the library and writing this I realized I did not clean the original HDD. Will test when I get home but in case imma finish). Now I get the ? Folder when booting without thumb drive in. And with it I just get a black screen, the fans get moving about 45 seconds in. I know there are no BIOS. If cleaning HDD doesn’t work what am I missing?

OK so I fixed it, what I did was used transmac on windows to format and restore the disc image of the install dvd onto a external hdd and then used it as an internal to install the os.

Please post a picture of the lock. There are password locks, firmware locks, EFI locks, iCloud locks and it makes a great deal of difference.

okay firstly if it’s just normal account password the process below would be useful first insert the flash drive you loaded the external OS on press the alt Botton at start up navigate with the left and right arrow keys while square gray box is on macintosh HD press cntr + s “not command” you should see the downward facing sign benit Macintosh HD change to a sign that looks like repeat sign in media players click return then restart with the soft key if you get to the password screen or just hard reset and while restarting try booting to safe mode again command+s type in mount “space” -uw “space” / (then return)

rm “space”/var/db/”no space”.applesetupdone(then return)

reboot (then return)press return on your keyboardshould look like thismount -uw /(then return)rm /var/db/.applesetupdone(then return)reboot(then return)Mac will restart normal and go blank to a greyish colour for about a minute or two be patientyou will be presented with a welcome screen to create a new administrator account and bonus the previous data on the other accounts will still be there if you haven’t wiped the SSD OR Hard driveyou should be able to use your Mac like normalNOTE !!! this is most likely to work on OS X El Capitan or higher can’t actually say about older Mac OS version before thatcheers