mac pro chime repeating at startup

How did you test it?

Allan

Contrary to what was said above multiple chimes on a mac pro is not a indication of bad ram on a mac pro. Bad ram indications by POST are 1 and 3 flash sequences of the light on the power button. I'm not saying you don't have bad ram, only that multiple beeps is not the indicator.

If the power button does indicate a ram problem you should see a lit diagnostic led near the dimm slot(s) that are a problem. There's also another bank of diagnostic leds on the motherboard as well. I suggest you look inside when this problem occurs and look for lit diagnostic leds.

Note, when pushing the power button the diagnostic leds near the dimms will flash momentarily. That is normal.

It sounds to me the if you are hearing repeated beeps, that possibly the machine is trying to boot, the boot fails, and then tries to reboot again, etc.

This maybe be due to a disk problem, or a corrupt version of the OS. So you should see if you can boot from your installer dvd (a failure doing this probably does mean a hardware problem) and run disk utility to repair the boot drive.

Usually multiple chimes indicate that POST found a problem with RAM.

Allan

Do the sizes of the DIMMs add up correctly? Is everything being recognized at its actual size? Some times RAM will fail by showing up at half its expected size, or by dropping out.

Apple Menu > About this Mac > ( More Info ) > Memory

I would suggest that you use Rember. So far it is the best memory test I know that can be run from a GUI. If you are comfortable with command line then you try Memtest.

Both of these are better at finding problems then anything else.

But even they need multiple runs to be sure there are no errors.

Allan

...where would i find the diganostilc LEDS on the ram?

They should be on each riser somewhere near the dimm slots. I any are on you will see them.

The other logic board diagnostic leds are grouped together. Below is a picture of what they are supposed to look like in a early 2008 Mac Pro:

should i also attempt to repair the drive?

That's what I suggested previously. And use your installer DVD to run Disk Utility to do it. Then you can verify whether your machined even boots and then verify the drives.

Just so I am clear. You were able to boot from you installer dvd and successfully repaired the drives. Then you rebooted from your machine, it chimed and started booting, failed, and chimed again and started booting again, and so on.

If this is what is happening then the repeated chimes are like what I initially described (repeated reboots). The fact that ram checks ok, you don't see any diagnostic leds, and boots ok from your installer dvd means (or has a high probability of) no hardware problems. That leaves the boot drive software is corrupted in some way. So all I can suggest at this point is reinstall (update install??).