Q: My Mac Pro spontaneously restarts

After months of frustration, this worked for me:

In System Preferences>Energy Saver select Restore Defaults.

Simple as that.

Now Apple should clear up the system bug.

This has been happening to me for the last month or so and it's driving me mad. It seems to have started immediately after installing several software updates. Could that just be coincidence? Ugh.

I have a second cockamamie theory (based on very little evidence) that this behavior is somehow connected to Safari, as it seems to happen shortly (or immediately) after launching Safari. Anybody else have the same association?

The thought of having to take my Mac into the shop and be without it is highly unpleasant. Has anybody solved this mystery yet?

That sounds smart enough. Those preferences affect the Power Manager and could get corrupted. I'm trying this immediately and see if the situation improves.

Hi guys i have been experiencing the same problem for a couple of months. the last few days it has rebooted itself roughly 6 or 7 times a day. Last evening i opened he side panel of my mac pro give it a dus out (although there was hardly any dust in there) i disconnected all the cables and pressed the SMC reset button inside plugged it all back in and so far it has been running with no problems for the last 24 hours. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Still no joy. The computer keeps restarting randomly. Must be hardware. I will bring it in for a service.

sorry to hear that mine has been running without a problem for the last 9 days.

Hi all, I have experienced the same thing as well and it is highly frustrating. My Mac Pro is not under warranty. I was doing my work a number of times and it restarted by itself and my work are all unsaved. It started having this problem before I installed Snow Leopard. The screen just froze, blue screen appeared and the computer is rebooted on its own. I installed Snow Leopard, thinking that it would helping resolve the problem. It improved slightly. But after 3weeks, the problem starts again.

After reading some of the posts here, I did the opening of side panel and tried to dust the internal of the computer using a brush with nylon bristles. I am not sure if I did it right but I did clean out a lot of dust. Then I tried to reset the SMC button. After which I start up the computer to try. It was ok for the first 15 mins. Then all of a sudden, the screen froze and a screen with distorted lines appeared for a brief moment before the computer restart on its own.

I guess it problem persists, I really have to lug this big baby to the service center again. Any other good ideas how resolve this frustrating issue? Really appreciate your help and advice!

Hi guys, i have had this problem for a while, tried loads of different ideas to try and determine the cause, to no avail, just when i thought i had cured, it does it again, i could not put up with any longer so took mine to apple for them to sort, am waiting for its return,ill keep you all posted on the out come, the genius implied that it all pointed to a dodgy PSU, luckily enough it did it in front of him at the genius bar.

Steve

a couple of months my mac also started restarting itself. i deleted everything to see if that would work, and now every time i put a c.d. or dvd it restarts itself. i don't think i have warranty on this thing anymore but is there anything i can do? thanks!
- jes

I have been having this issue too. It's been doing this sort of randomly until it did it 3 times today. It first surfaced while watching flash video online. That happened again today, watching a flash video stream.

One other very interesting symptom I've had is that I've been working on a Final Cut Pro project, and I've noticed that FCP has been hanging a lot lately, as is iTunes. They both seem to go down together, and that could be a result of my putting my system to sleep.

This requires a full reboot as even though I can force quit the applications they never start up again. It'll hang at the splash screen if I try to restart 'em.

It will also not fully restart the system but hang at the wallpaper just before it should reboot. So I have to hard reset.

Seems like it's related, but I'm not sure what starts the snowballing. I've cleared smc, opened up my system and cleaned out any dust accumulation, and let it sit about 10 minutes fully restart after a healthy shutdown.

Keeping fingers crossed....

Unfortunately all the tweaks I made last night didn't resolve the issue. It rebooted twice last night, at random.

I ran a check on my OS disk and it came back with errors. I will fix the disk and see if that helps. Not sure if that's related or not, but I'll do everything I can software-wise to avoid any hardware replacement!

Did anyone here have luck replacing anything? PLEASE ADVISE!!!

I just tried this and it kept my computer alive for 60 minutes before 6-8 rapid restarts..

Time to put me on this boat. Last few months I've been getting the random restarts. Tried almost every trick everyone listed here but I have day when there will be no restarts and days, like this morning, it must have restarted at least a dozen times. Sometimes the fans crank up and won't stop even after an auto restart, other times the computer will be fine all day, sleep for hours, I wake it up and "BAM", it shuts down and restarts.

Since I'm not the only person on these boards with this issue, I think it has to be something in one of the updates, either the OS or Safari/iTunes. Both of these apps now run much slower now after the more recents updates. I wonder if Apple is listening? We all just can't be having the same problem by coincidence.

Yesterday I had no random restarts. This morning about 8. Can anyone enlighten me as to why this might be happening. Maybe this could help:

8/25/10 6:55:10 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: <MDSFetchTask: 0x102519040>{taskID:0x0000b001 age:<1ms} couldn't fetch attributes: (os/kern) object terminated
8/25/10 6:55:10 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: <MDSFetchTask: 0x102519040>{taskID:0x0000b002 age:<1ms} couldn't fetch attributes: (os/kern) object terminated
8/25/10 6:55:10 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: <MDSFetchTask: 0x102519040>{taskID:0x0000b004 age:<1ms} couldn't fetch attributes: (os/kern) object terminated
8/25/10 6:55:10 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: <MDSFetchTask: 0x102307b50>{taskID:0x0000b005 age:<1ms} couldn't fetch attributes: (os/kern) object terminated
8/25/10 6:55:25 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: Bad checksum on fetch attributes reply from store
8/25/10 6:55:25 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: <MDSFetchTask: 0x1025f7af0>{taskID:0x0000b00b age:<1ms} couldn't fetch attributes: (os/kern) object terminated
8/25/10 6:55:47 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: Bad checksum on fetch attributes reply from store
8/25/10 6:55:47 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: <MDSFetchTask: 0x102404850>{taskID:0x0000b011 age:<1ms} couldn't fetch attributes: (os/kern) object terminated
8/25/10 6:56:00 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: Bad checksum on fetch attributes reply from store
8/25/10 6:56:00 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: <MDSFetchTask: 0x102404850>{taskID:0x0000b017 age:<1ms} couldn't fetch attributes: (os/kern) object terminated
8/25/10 6:56:15 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: Bad checksum on fetch attributes reply from store
8/25/10 6:56:15 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: <MDSFetchTask: 0x1025f9df0>{taskID:0x0000b01d age:<1ms} couldn't fetch attributes: (os/kern) object terminated
8/25/10 6:56:37 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: Bad checksum on fetch attributes reply from store
8/25/10 6:56:37 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: <MDSFetchTask: 0x102343670>{taskID:0x0000b023 age:<1ms} couldn't fetch attributes: (os/kern) object terminated
8/25/10 6:57:07 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: Bad checksum on fetch attributes reply from store
8/25/10 6:57:07 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: <MDSFetchTask: 0x102322780>{taskID:0x0000b029 age:<1ms} couldn't fetch attributes: (os/kern) object terminated
8/25/10 6:57:19 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: Bad checksum on fetch attributes reply from store
8/25/10 6:57:19 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: <MDSFetchTask: 0x10250b970>{taskID:0x0000b02f age:<1ms} couldn't fetch attributes: (os/kern) object terminated
8/25/10 6:57:34 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: Bad checksum on fetch attributes reply from store
8/25/10 6:57:34 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: <MDSFetchTask: 0x102510a20>{taskID:0x0000b035 age:<1ms} couldn't fetch attributes: (os/kern) object terminated
8/25/10 6:57:49 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: Bad checksum on fetch attributes reply from store
8/25/10 6:57:49 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: <MDSFetchTask: 0x1023227b0>{taskID:0x0000b03b age:<1ms} couldn't fetch attributes: (os/kern) object terminated
8/25/10 6:57:58 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: Bad checksum on fetch attributes reply from store
8/25/10 6:57:58 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: <MDSFetchTask: 0x102511880>{taskID:0x0000b041 age:<1ms} couldn't fetch attributes: (os/kern) object terminated
8/25/10 6:58:07 AM /System/Library/CoreServices/CCacheServer.app/Contents/MacOS/CCacheServer[160] No valid tickets, timing out
8/25/10 6:58:09 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: Bad checksum on fetch attributes reply from store
8/25/10 6:58:09 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: <MDSFetchTask: 0x102519040>{taskID:0x0000b047 age:<1ms} couldn't fetch attributes: (os/kern) object terminated
8/25/10 6:58:18 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: Bad checksum on fetch attributes reply from store
8/25/10 6:58:18 AM mds[57] (Error) Task: <MDSFetchTask: 0x102602020>{taskID:0x0000b04d age:<1ms} couldn't fetch attributes: (os/kern) object terminated

4 randoms this morning in the middle of a FCP 2 hour render.... doesn't anyone know what's going on with this?