Kernel panic at boot from HD, freezing at boot from external media.
I've got a Mac Pro (2008, 2.8 totally stock) here that kernel panics on boot from internal HD, and just gets stuck at the grey screen with Apple logo when booting from USB et al. In either case, there are blue vertical bars on the screen:
Which leads me to suspect the graphics card. But I don't have another graphics card here to test it with, which leads me to the question... how can I troubleshoot this thing?
I tried removing the graphics card and booting the machine with an ethernet cable plugged in to see if I saw the MAC address show up on the network (using ARD), but saw nothing. I'm not sure what that's indicative of though, as I see where maybe these things can't boot without a graphics card?
Other things I've tried:
Reset PRAM - nothing
Reset SMC - nothing
boot in safe mode - strangely, it tried for a lot longer to boot than it normally would, but still kernel panicked.
Any ideas?