Mac Pro cold boot failure rate at 50%

This evening the system rebooted and chimed 3 times before getting to a login screen. Is there an easy way to test the drive? I used Disk Utility once to verify the disk, it didn't come up as needing a repair. I read somewhere, that there is a diagnostic tool on the original disks that came with the mac. As the posting was pretty old (pre osx?) not sure if that is still valid info. I have looked on the disk for the util.

I've been hoping someone else has had this issue and can say definitively what the issue is.

The saga continues...I went ahead and use the d option on the original power mac dvd and the mac came up with no hardware problems. Even so, I decided to replace the Hard Drive (I have been suspect that the drive may not have been spinning up right away and might be the cause of the failed boots).

New drive in place...on day two, the machine chimed twice before booting, but it booted. Hopefully, it will boot reliably from now on and this problem is solved.

I found no indications from smart or Apples hardware diagnostics tool which indicate the hard drive is the problem.

Since I am out of other ideas, I went ahead replaced the hard drive....waiting to see if the problem comes back.

Do you think you might be having memory problems?

Your mac Pro has Error Correcting Code (ECC) Memory, which stores a few extra bits with each word in memory, and checks it when it reads it out. Single-bit errors are corrected on-the-fly, but double bit errors, although detected, cannot be corrected, so they often cause a kernel panic or restart.

Both single-bit errors and double-bit errors usually leave a trail. In Apple System Profiler:

Apple Menu > About this Mac > ( More info ) > Memory ...

... you may see modules at half their normal size, or a status other than "OK"

If you open Console.app, you can read through recent messages, and you may see a crash report from a date & time you remember it was having trouble or crashed..

The new hard drive didn't help. (I went from a 750 mb seagate to a 1 gig, so possibley it could be a seagate thing...i doubt it as the orig seagate drive was in the system many years without this problem..either way I have a new drive in now)

The console is bringing some issues with my tablet and parrallels...but this is all after it actually boots. Not booting is what I am trying to debug. This could very well a wacom tablet thing.

The "Litmus test" for these sorts of problems is to boot with Extensions Off (Safe Mode) you do this by holding down the Shift key at startup. It takes several minutes longer to boot up because it also does a disk check as it starts up.

If you boot fine with Extensions Off, but no so well with extensions ON, the problem lies in the extensions.