Q: Dual Quad-core Mac Pro reboots from sleep

V.K. wrote:
how do you deselect the start up disk? i can't manage to do it.

1) Insert install DVD, and choose it as startup disk; shut down; start up holding eject key

2) Mount external FW disk with bootable copy of OS X; select as start-up disk; shut down; disconnect FW disk

I'm not sure if #1 actually works, because I did #2. But I think it should. Someone else described this in more detail earlier in this thread. Scroll back a few pages to find it.

thanks, that's pretty ingenious. I'm kind of skeptical but I'll give it a shot. These restarts from sleep are driving me nuts. Plus I'm afraid they are messing up the directory system.

well, so much for that theory. Deselected the start up drive and on the third sleep attempt, it rebooted.

Apple will have to expend some money recalling the whole 2008 Mac Pro production for replacing motherboards. Or loose their credibility forever.

Hmmm... I haven't had a reboot since I deselected the startup disk. Of course that may be coincidence - it has only been three days.

Trinity, what makes you think this is a motherboard issue?

I only wish I could depend upon Apple to address this. Unfortunately, if history is any indication that could take months or it actually may never happen. The most troubling sign is that this has still not been publicly acknowledged as an issue, and that 9 out of 10 "product specialists" refuse to admit they know anything about this.

(One must wonder: do they intentionally lie to customers who call in? Because at this point I find it difficult to believe that there's a Mac Pro product specialist anywhere at Apple who hasn't had at least one call on this.)

it's Apple's silence that makes me think in an expensive solution. I can't believe that a serious computer company can't isolate a problem like this in their professional product in 3 months. They have to know perfectly what is the cause and if it was solvable with a firmware update it would be already released.

Today i lost again a bunch of opened windows because of this problem, i really hate it. I hate it also that the majority of the users seem to get it fixed for a few weeks and then it comes back.. pffff

Do you think that the designers of the Mac Pro at least click once in a while to discussions -> mac pro to see what the biggest complains are about their design ? Their work ? Their work of 'art' ??

If they do, like normal humans, they would see the cry of help of so many users.. they would fix it ?

Yves wrote:

Do you think that the designers of the Mac Pro at least click once in a while to discussions -> mac pro to see what the biggest complains are about their design ? Their work ? Their work of 'art' ??

If they do, like normal humans, they would see the cry of help of so many users.. they would fix it ?

In answer to your questions: no, no, not exactly a work of art, and probably not. :<

the problem is that it's the people at the top of the chain who make these decisions. i'm sure the engineers care about their products but it's the **** corporate people who decide what to fix and what not to fix. a lot of these people high up in the chain dont care about quality, about satisfying the customers, and really only care about the $ in the end. unfortunately, too many things get left unfixed forever.

for ex, there is a problem with the DVD drives in one of the laptop models that will not burn dvds and everyone has the same problem. apple's known about it for ages yet nothing is done about it, and tech support is obviously told to pretend they dont know about it or theyre just kept in the dark b/c the problem is never even acknowledged.

why is it that there is no communication from apple on these forums? why dont they interact? do they not care at all about their users, what they have to say, or any positive or negative experiences?

cant there at least be a few techs interacting with the forum discussions? i've never seen any.

Message was edited by: shape

personally i think it's either that the power supply in all these mac pro's is defective or it's a software problem with Leopard and energy saver. hopefully, it's the latter. but if it was, then why no acknowledgment or update fix?

Actually I had a similar issue in that I had to re-pair my macpro to the wireless might mouse after a reboot-from-sleep.

I have been having issues with sleeping, but not as often since I reset the PRAM & SMC. A few days ago I unplugged my firewire external hard drive and my computer went to sleep! So, I called Apple Care and they told me to bring my Mac into my local shop to have it checked out. I told the rep that I could not predict what caused the problems but that there was definitely something wrong.

Well everyone, I just got my Mac Pro back from the shop and they could not find a problem. They ran every test (which I had run before with no errors) and slept it overnight with no problems. Because they could not find anything wrong they charged my $45 and said "Apple Care does not cover warranty issues when there is no problem found." When a problem is actually acknowledged by Apple, they better give me a $45 credit.

So, if you have a computer with sleeping issues and you are past the 14 day return window, don't bring it in to a shop without being able to reproduce the problem.

Just off the phone is Apple support. I'm not sure I saw anyone posting this, but my support guy suggested that it might be a software issue and that I should try using a different account on my mac to test out the idea. Just started out on a fresh account so no results yet, but I'll keep you all posted. I'm not optimistic being that the issue arose out of the box...

It is too bad you had to pay. I had mine in for the freezing with mouse still moving problem. They had mine a week and could not duplicate a problem. They did an archive and install just for grins and gave it back to me. I did not have to pay. The firmware update for the ATI 2600 came out a few days later and one or the other thing apparently fixed my problem. I still have the restart after sleep problem, but had determined that nothing really fixes it permanently. I got a case number from Apple, but told them I was not going to take my computer back in again for them to look at that. I am going to just not put the computer to sleep for the time being and hope that Apple can figure out what it wrong. I have to believe that the Mac Pro's that are at Apple would be acting the same way. It would be nice if Apple would acknowledge that there is an apparent problem.

I was searching through the trouble shooting data base on the Apple support site
and found the following:

Note: Mac Pro (Early 2008) does not have an SMC_RST switch,
refer to the reset procedure steps in the previous section.

See the following for the details:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304123

-Doug