Dual Quad-core Mac Pro reboots from sleep

I have the same problem.
Early 2008 Mac Pro dual quad core 2,8GHz 2Gb no 3rd party hardware.

Sometimes it reboots, sometimes it wakes from sleep. I haven't been able to find a pattern. Problem occurs whether it was put to sleep manually or fell asleep automatically.

I'm curious. Does it reboot sometimes if you put it to sleep, then awaken it immediately? Mine has never done that (which complicates testing). It tends to reboot if it's been asleep for many hours. I've solved it for now by never sleeping the entire computer, but it makes VIRTUALLY no noise when the drives and displays are asleep, so I must be conserving SOME energy then while risking data loss less.

No it does not reboot after a 'quick nap'.
After 5 to 10 minutes though, chances of a reboot seem to dramatically increase.
No pattern though, it sometimes wakes up fine from a good night's sleep.

Tom.

Some posts ago, I said that my new Mac Pro was waking fine. Well, I have just installed 2Gb of RAM from OWC and now it reboots from sleep.

Interesting : I cannot reproduce the problem when running Vista.
This leads me to believe it might be Leopard-related.

Tom.

I don't know if it is a hardware, software or firmware issue, but tomorrow I will refund the whole thing to the Apple online Store. I will buy it again when/if they solve the bug.
I have been working for 7 years with a flawless G4 Cube and I don't want to downgrade to a buggy computer paying 2500 euros for it...

If I understand what you're saying, this is the first real clue that this isn't a hardware problem. By "running Vista" I assume you mean you're doing so via Boot Camp, so that the Mac OS isn't even apparent to the hardware. If that's the case, I'd say your report should reassure us all that it has something to do with Leopard's energy management.

On the other hand, if you're running Vista under Parallels or Fusion, I haven't the slightest idea what the implications are (except perhaps that if you've not suspended the virtual machine, it doesn't really GO to sleep completely, and in that case there could still be an underlying hardware glitch.

So, which is it?

🙂
Jim Robertson

I'm running Vista natively, so yes this is a strong clue the problem might be software related.

By the way, you cannot put a host machine to sleep from a guest OS running in a virtual machine.

Tom

I have an "old" 2.66GHz Mac Pro, but I have a similar problem. About 20% of the time that I try to wake it from sleep, it either reboots immediately, hangs with no video or network presence, or (rarely) gives me the multilingual kernel-panic screen.

I'm mentioning this here because some of you are speculating that it's a Leopard-related thing. You may be right, because I used this computer for nine months with Tiger and never had a single problem waking it up.

Ok, a brief summary of this thread up to now :

_Affected hardware_:
Early 2008 Mac Pro w/ dual quad core, all CPU speeds
_Operating system_:
OS X 10.5.1
Symptoms:
Mac reboots after sleep instead of waking up, chances of reboot seem to increase with length of sleep.
Solutions:
Reset PRAM : apparently not effective
Reset SMC : apparently not effective

From my personal experience, this problem is difficult to simulate consistently, though it seems to be a software issue and is not necessarily related to 3rd party hardware.

I would welcome results from other users :

1. Running windows natively (XP or Vista whichever) : can the problem be reproduced ?

2. Running any OSX version lower than 10.5.1 : anyone have this problem ?

3. Anyone start experiencing this problem on older hardware only after an upgrade to Leaopard ?

Tom.

The report on AYM on 2008 feedback, some people just don't sleep their system for now.

SMC button was removed, wasn't it? no longer have the button under drive #4 that before you could physically press to do SMC Reset. And unplugging my unit (2006) didn't result in a "full" SMC reset when I needed to once. Zapping PRAM/NVRAM might have.

PS: I run Vista on my 2006 unit, but I have to use InputRemapper to boost the fans to keep it from getting too warm as the fans aren't kicking in automatically based on thermal sensors. Do yours? Your system has later EFI firmware and better support for Vista, so I hope so.

Same here. The problem started after about one week and aside from a factory installed Airport and two extra hard drives that I put in, the configuration is essentially stock.

Here is more on the subject:

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/business/appleaday/blog/2008/01/justwake_my_mac_pro_whenits.html

Trinity, if you remove the OWC RAM, does it work again? With the OWC ram, does it ever sleep-wake correctly? How long in sleep does it require to cause the reboot? Seconds, minutes, longer?
Can you do two things: 1. open a terminal window (click on terminal app) and type

nvram -p

return. Paste results here.

2. post your memory config from the system profiler. paste here as well...

Add another new Mac Pro (2 x 2.8 Quad Core, stock ram) to the list. After a long sleep, it reboots instead of waking up.

I also have the video card lockups. 😟

Count me in, too. 2x2,8GHz with stock memory.

I wasn't able to reproduce it by repeatedly waking my MacPro from sleep. It only seems to happen after prolonged sleeps.

The snippet below shows the log messages in /var/log/system.log from a regular sleep/wake cycle. In case of reboot, even the first line is missing from the log file.

Feb 6 09:07:42 MacPro kernel[0]: System Sleep
Feb 6 19:25:12 MacPro kernel[0]: System Wake
Feb 6 19:25:12 MacPro kernel[0]: Previous Sleep Cause: 5
Feb 6 19:25:12 MacPro kernel[0]: USB caused wake event (EHCI)