Q: Dual Quad-core Mac Pro reboots from sleep

I must have crashed the system about ten times a day for a week

I had trouble with mouse moving and system frozen but old Mac Pro, running 10.5.1.

I would say the directory was bad; that Disk Utility would not repair let alone see problems, and only Disk Warrior fixed it - and/or a clean install.

Jeffinnyc wrote:
P O S S I B L E S O L U T I O N

I have the dual quad-core 3.2 with the Radeon HD 2600 card.

so maybe there was something going on in the usb system.

You might be onto something here. I have a wireless USB mouse from microsoft. I usually wake up my computer by touching the mouse. Normally this wakes it up but sometimes it doesn't. In such situations if I touch the keyboard I often get a reboot.

I just chose standby while in windows (on a hard drive in bay 2) and left for an hour. When I came back, the system had rebooted. This problem exists on both the OS drive and on the windows drive for me.

This is very interesting. Are you now only using the ports on the USB 2.0 card (i.e. you don't have any devices plugged into the standard Apple USB ports)?

I've got $30 for a Sonnet USB 2.0 card, no problem, but adding a second monitor to fix a computer that should be working out of the box seems a bit of a stretch. I don't have the space for a new monitor, nor the need for one.

Twist1 wrote:
I just chose standby while in windows (on a hard drive in bay 2) and left for an hour. When I came back, the system had rebooted. This problem exists on both the OS drive and on the windows drive for me.

This sounds like very bad news. I assume you're running the computer solely as a Windows box; i.e., in Boot Camp. This is very important, because early in this thread there were reports from a user who had the problem in the Mac OS, but not while the computer was running Windows natively. This has been the piece of data I've held on to hoping that eventually the problem would be found in the bowels of the Mac OS.

On the other hand, if you're running Windows within Parallels or Fusion, the Mac OS is still talking at low levels to the hardware and a reboot wouldn't have exactly the same significance.

I'm having a really strange problem and I'm starting if it's a Mac Pro '08 firmware issue rather than OS X/user issue.

I have the dock set to appear and disappear automatically. But when I run the mouse down to the bottom of the screen, it doesn't appear. I have to "click" in that area to get it to appear. Also, when I select a menu in the finder or in an application, and then scroll through the menu items, they do not highlight as they should. I can click on an item to activate it, but they aren't highlighted as I scroll through.

Also, in some applications, windows don't appear and disappear normally as they should. For example, with Adobe Lightroom I have it set up so that the adjustment panels on the left and right automatically appear and disappear. But they aren't doing that anymore.

A restart and permissions repair will temporarily solve the problem, but it inevitably returns (sometimes within an hour, sometimes a few days). I have three users on my computer, and it happens in each user account.

I've done an archive and install and that didn't help. Then I did a complete reinstall, and used Migration Assistant and Time Machine to restore my applications and user data. That didn't help.

I wonder if this is related somehow to the issues with screen freezes others are seeing?

I installed XP Pro x64 on an internal in bay 2 without using Boot Camp. I am going to switch back to windows to try to duplicate the problem.

Twist1 wrote:
I installed XP Pro x64 on an internal in bay 2 without using Boot Camp. I am going to switch back to windows to try to duplicate the problem.

I'm curious. Just how are you installing Windows natively on a Mac, if not through Boot Camp? I can't recall reading instructions for installing Windows (any version) on an Intel Mac and booting into that OS without Boot Camp providing drivers for some of the Mac-specific hardware bits (drivers that don't come with Windows XP).

I think he meant that he didn't use the bootcamp assistant.
all the bootcamp assistant does is partition your hard drive and format one partition NTFS. You can easily do this yourself using disk utility. Then you can restart from a windows DVD and continue install from there. Of course you still have to install the drivers after you are done. there is no getting around that.

JimRobertson wrote:

Twist1 wrote:
I installed XP Pro x64 on an internal in bay 2 without using Boot Camp. I am going to switch back to windows to try to duplicate the problem.

I'm curious. Just how are you installing Windows natively on a Mac, if not through Boot Camp? I can't recall reading instructions for installing Windows (any version) on an Intel Mac and booting into that OS without Boot Camp providing drivers for some of the Mac-specific hardware bits (drivers that don't come with Windows XP).

I put in the Windows install disc then shut down my computer. I then removed the drive from bay 1 and added one to bay 2. When I restarted it booted from the Windows install disc and asked me if I wanted to install Windows on the drive in bay 2. I said yes and it formatted the drive and installed the system without any problems. You do have to do a bit of fishing for drivers, but that was relatively painless. I did it this way so I can use XP Pro x64.

Twist1 wrote:

I put in the Windows install disc then shut down my computer. I then removed the drive from bay 1 and added one to bay 2. When I restarted it booted from the Windows install disc and asked me if I wanted to install Windows on the drive in bay 2. I said yes and it formatted the drive and installed the system without any problems. You do have to do a bit of fishing for drivers, but that was relatively painless. I did it this way so I can use XP Pro x64.

So, clearly you're running Windows natively. As such, your report of a reboot on attempting to "wake up" your Windows box from Standy (actually, I think what you said was that the box rebooted while you were away) is indeed bad news for those of us who retained hope this problem resided somewhere in the bowels of the Mac OS rather than in the hardware itself.

Having said that, I should note that I enjoy almost all the benefits of sleep by setting my monitors to shut down and my hard drives to sleep after a certain interval. Under those circumstances, with all kinds of stuff attached to the USB ports, 3 internal drives, 4 gigabytes of OWC RAM, and two monitors, the Mac hasn't rebooted from sleep in the last 6 weeks (but I don't sleep the entire box). So, we may all drown a few nanoseconds earlier and my power bill is a dollar or two higher each month because of my non-Green behavior, but at least my data is safe.

Twist1 wrote:
I just chose standby while in windows (on a hard drive in bay 2) and left for an hour. When I came back, the system had rebooted. This problem exists on both the OS drive and on the windows drive for me.

When I booted back to the windows drive I got a message that said "recovering from a fatal error." I decided to try to duplicate the problem and sure enough.... I put the computer to sleep several times and the first few times everything was OK. On the third try the only thing that would wake it up is tapping the power button (which has happened before). I pressed the power button slightly and the computer woke up with the message "Windows is shutting down."

I hope this is not a hardware issue.

Follow-up: After having no reboot problems for a week using my OWC-bought Seagate swapped into Bay 1, I tried booting off the original drive in Bay 3. After three days, I've had no reboots on wake. I still don't understand why, but now I have not a single reboot for nearly two weeks. (knock on wood)

You can add my brandnew 2x2.8 to the list.
Same problem!
Resetting PRAM and SMC helped - don´t know how long though.
It did it from the first time I put it to sleep!

Apple please act!

Same here. Only I didn't do anything different. No ram swaps, no drive swaps, no BT changes; nothing. But, I do have to set sleep manually cause it won't do so automatically, despite the default sleep settings on my vanilla machine.

BTW, this just out:

http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/atiradeonhd2600xtfirmwareupdate.html

"Installing this update on a 2.8 GHz Mac Pro system configured with multiple hard drives or more than 2GB of RAM will result in the system meeting Energy Star 3.0 requirements."