Q: MacPro won’t boot after black screen, graphics card may be implicated
The ATI Radeon graphics card in my 2008 MacPro model failed recently (fills the screen with fine vertical lines in red, green and blue), so I tried reinstalling its predecessor, an Nvidia Geforce 8800GT. That had also apparently failed, at least with OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard which I was running at the time.
To my surprise, the Geforce worked with OSX 10.9.5 Mavericks. There were some odd yellow patches on screen at first, but this seemed to sort itself out in the first day.
I went on using the Mac with the old card without problems for several days, then one morning I got the ‘black screen after sleep’ problem. I wasn’t able to put the Mac back to sleep via the power button, and so did a force shut down.
Since then it won’t boot. Trying to boot from Mavericks, the Apple logo screen appears OK and the spoked ‘wheel’ starts to spin but stops quite quickly and no matter how long I waited, the boot up did not continue. The 10.9.5 ‘recovery’ volume has the same problem.
I have multiple drives, so tried booting from a 10.6.8 volume. This produced the same broad black and white stripes on screen that forced me to replace the Geforce 8800GT with the Radeon card in 2013, and I can’t tell if it completes the boot up or not. The Radeon card doesn’t produce anything usable with either OS version.
The Mavericks drive is an SSD which I have been able to use successfully in a USB caddy with my laptop, with access to all my files. I ran Disk Utility on the SSD from the laptop (an old Core2duo running 10.6.8), which identified and appeared to fix a problem with extended attributes on the SSD. But now the MacPro keeps restarting and presenting the message “Your computer restarted because of a problem. Press a key or wait a few seconds to continue starting up.”
Could the old graphics card somehow be responsible for the boot failure or is it entirely coincidental? I did restart more than once with it installed since the Radeon card failed, but those were deliberate restarts, not from forced shutdowns, if that makes a difference.
I can buy another graphics card if I have to but getting the Mac to boot at all is the more pressing problem. I would appreciate any advice, please.
Mac Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.1)
Posted on Aug 29, 2016 3:05 PM