2010 mac pro with OS X10.7.3 won't boot.

Question

2010 mac pro with OS X10.7.3 won't boot.

I shut down my mac yesterday and when I restarted it today the chime sounded as usual the white screen appeared and the apple logo along with the spinning disk underneath also appeared then the screen went bright white for a second as it uually does before the desktop appears then the spinning disk that appeared beneath the apple logo during the boot process reappeared and just keeps disappearing and reapearing.

I have tried to boot into safe mode and have also tried to boot onto my USB key that I used to install lion but the mac pro just ignores my key presses and goes through the process described above.

So I am not sure what to do now.

Posted on May 5, 2012 8:29 AM

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Answer 1

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

May 5, 2012 8:49 AM in response to macnewcomer22

pull your hard drive and tell us what happens

model and configuration detail helps

Also, you still kept 10.6.8 on another hard drive hopefully, yes?

Have your OEM DVD 10.6.4+?

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Answer 2

May 5, 2012 9:38 AM in response to The hatter

My drive is the Hitachi Deskstar 7K4000 4TB SATA 6Gbs 64MB Cache 7200RPM When I removed it and rebooted initially the same thing but on the second try I got to the log in screen but when I tried to log in it obviously would not let me go any further

While I was waiting for a response I also tried resetting the SMC but that was to no avail.

My Mac pro configuation is I have 4 hard drives installed and two optical drives installed and I do have my 10.6 dvd.

I also have a SuperDuper clone backup of my 10.6.8 installation.

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Answer 3

May 5, 2012 10:02 AM in response to macnewcomer22

"Snag keys" used at startup may not work from a keyboard connected via a display hub. Be sure your keyboard is directly-connected to a USB on the chassis, then try again.

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Answer 4

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

May 5, 2012 10:23 AM in response to macnewcomer22

actually I was more interested in Mac Pro model 5,1 / GPU / and changes and upgrades you made.

And of course 4TB are usually media drives, not boot drives.

If you remove the bootdrive you should get the "?" on startup, and looks for other boot volumes - if any of the drives are corrupt directory it can prevent booting.

There should not be any trouble "log in" from another boot drive or volume. Not now with the primary boot drive removed.

Your 10.6 DVD may or may not support the current GPU - 10.6.3 was the last retail version; or is it Mid-2010 OEM DVD, which is 10.6.4.

Should have clone Lion and Lion Recovery to another drive for backup and emergency, CCC does clone both partitions.

And with Lion you should try Lion Recovery Mode first and foremost.

Apple Support Lion Installation and Recovery

Lion Recovery Mode

Recovery options for Macs running OS X Lion MacFixIt - CNET Reviews

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Answer 5

May 27, 2012 3:20 AM in response to The hatter

Well I decided to abandon trying to sort the issue out, and as I had a recent clone backup decided to reinstall from the clone. After a few days however the system locked me out again, which it should not have done as on the previous occasion and this one I had not specified a login be requried when starting up the stystem. So OS X was taking it upon it self to insert a required login at boot, and on top of that my passwor would not let me access the system so OS X had erased my originally set password. So for a third time I reinstalled the system from the same clone backup as on both previous occasions the system had been stable for such a short space of time (only about a wek both times) that there had been nothing put on the system that required me to do a up to date clone.

This time however the system started having issues with in a day or two, started being very slow and sluggish launchpad for example when I swiped could not even manage to scroll to the next page of apps and then apps started refusing to open.

I have run 2 separate hard drive utillities over the drive and they have found no issues so this makes no sense to me what so ever why OS X is having issues wih the 4TB drive.

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