My Mac Pro spontaneously restarts

Kurok, Iv'e mentioned this in the past as I had the same issue. But have you ever replaced the CR2032 battery on the mother board (located under the pcie cards)?

Now weather it was a combination of blowing out the unit with air and unpluging and reseating ram, pcie and hds that contributed but since changing the battery and doing a SMC reset (think that's what it was called). I've had no problems. For the sake of a couple of quid (or dollars) it's worth a try. after all the thing as been in there for 5 years!

I've never replaced the battery but will do so as, while the computer is 5 years old, it still works well and does what I need it to do.

I tried and it didn't work at all. Tried two as a matter of fact just to see if one was dead. At least it fit in the garage opener. Wasn't a total waste.

Update:

My new 2012 Mac Pro Spontaneously Shutdown and rebooted 2 times today. Never a mac again. I did a search and there are tons of people complaining about this all over the place. I called apple and it could be a software or hardware issue. Nice, eh? No one I know has these issues with PC's. I'm done with macs. Losing too much work and too much time. If I had apple stock, I'd sell it.

Orepcracker we all know how frustrating this problem is but don't give up too soon, I had exactly the same thing a year ago, it turned out to be a crappy batch of Kingston ram,

I got a refund from Kingston and bought Crucial ram instead and I have had no problems at all since, so it turned out not to be Apples fault after all

obviously not everyone will have the same issue as me but it's worth trying a few options before giving up,

I have to agree with you regarding PC's, the components are cheap, you can build your own system exactly how you want it and it's easy to replace parts if they fail without breaking the bank

Robert, I just got new ram and that's when it started. Got it from OWC. I think I'll get in touch with them. Thx for the support. It is frustrating when you're in the middle of a job.

Robert, I just called and I'm getting new ram. I'll see how that goes. Thank you for the suggestion. Very frustrating when you just got rid of an old one that did it, then died, and now the new one. I'll keep my fingers crossed that it's the ram.

Robert,

I put the chips that came with the mac back in and it just shut down and rebooted itself. One more time and I'm asking apple for a refund. I haven't paid the credit card bill yet and won't until it's resolved. Had it with Apple. No wonder their stock took a nose dive and don't think we've seen the bottom.

Interestingly, the Reboot-Issue with my MP was probably also due to a defective RAM-module.

By chance, I discovered I had "lost" several GB. After systematically exchanging the affected modules,

I could verify that 1 module has given up, logically shutting down a second module. Luckily, the Riser wasn't affected.

Long story short: since the defective module is deinstalled, I did not encounter one single unwanted reboot.

Wouldn't blame Apple for that. It's indeed the first hardware defect I encounter since about 18 years of using Apple computers. And it's not even made by Apple.

It would just have been better, if OSX would have informed me somehow about the defect, as I don't think, I would have noticed the red LED on the riser board during the coming years…

(by a color changing LED on the front panel probably…)

Some times the error occurs ...

... in the error reporting routine.

This typically does a normal kernel panic, but the report may be incomplete. You may have just been unlucky and the error routine could not do anything but shut down.

Thank you for the head up. Yes, this might have been the cause.

(After both spontaneaous reboots there was no Crash Report but the System Log showed up entries about the Notification Center, so I was heading in this direction. I discovered the RAM issue just by chance while changing Photoshop's Preferences.

Just thought, it would be nice if OSX would inform the user somehow when the computer's hardware differs from the setup from the last boot. If one changes hardware, one only would need to verify this new setup once, but when something breaks, one would get an info… or some way to pass the signal from the Riser LED on to the outside of the computer, so it would be better noticable…)

btw, do you know whether a missing Crash Report indicates more to a hardware issue in general, while a generated Crash Report would always be related to software issues?

(I'm just asking, I'm luckily pretty new to hardware defects 😊 )

R.Simon-

There is an alert that comes up -- if the memory configuration you are left with is non-optimum for memory speed.

If your computer suddenly shuts down, you should always go looking for a panic report:

Mac OS X: How to log a kernel panic

Thank you again!

well, it seems I was really unhappily hit: the MP neither generated a Crash Report nor a Panic Report. As one RAM module on Riser B was affected (while both Risers are fully equipped), there was no chance to get the RAM configuration error report, as the remaining modules still met at least Apple's guideline for RAM placements.

Murphy's law again…

(The replacement module should arrive this week, then most likely everything will revert to it's usual state…)

I was searching for weeks and finally came across and article that mentioned how these random restarts are a glitch in mid-2010 Macbooks that Apple will replace free of charge. Being that I had already tried every logical other alternative out there with no success, I went into the the Apple store (for a second time, the first, they were clueless), showed them the article and they were like "oh yeah" must be the glitch.

Replaced my logic board for free. Issue has not occurred since. Happy days! Apple evidently didn't want to make the glitch knowledge readily available because they thought too many people would claim the fix. I think that's pretty shady, but I'm happy my computer finally works correctly. :|

Apple evidently didn't want to make the glitch knowledge readily available because they thought too many people would claim the fix.

That conspiracy theory is not evident to me. It seems much more likley that the article had not been widely circulated.

Is this the article ?

TS4088 - MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010): Intermittent black screen or loss of video