Hello, it seems I have run into a similar situation. As fate would have it, it was precisely today that I got my hands on an iMac G5 17" iSight (model A1144), which happens to have a SATA hard drive.
I tried booting 7.6 GENERIC and it gets stuck waiting for the pciide wd0 drive, happy to provide more information if needed. I'll continue to look into this in a few hours, would be nice to know if someone has managed to boot on these late models, they are fairly modern use ddr2 ram, etc. I also wonder if the gpu will behave as it is pciexpress. Best
