Mac Pro 3.1 startup problem

Question

Mac Pro 3.1 startup problem

Hi all,

i have a 2008 3.1 8 core mac pro with 16gigs of ram.

I recently upgraded to Mavericks and since then sometimes it doest make it to the os desktop and hangs at the grey screen with the apple logo and some writing code appears from which i dont understand a thing...

Ill attach a photo to explain better. i guess you will not be able to descern the writing but so you can see the screen...

When it does boot up without this problem all is working perfect and not with a single problem.

The rate at which this is happening i would say is 3 or 4 crashes out of 10 start-ups...

What could be the problem ?

Thanks a lot guys !

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Posted on Jan 17, 2014 10:16 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,547 points

Jan 17, 2014 1:35 PM in response to gabriel_brosteanu

Reinstall the original memory and see whether there's an improvement.

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Answer 2

A H1

Level 1

53 points

Jan 18, 2014 9:54 AM in response to gabriel_brosteanu

Wow. It links like partway into boot sequence it switches unsuccessfully into single user mode.

Does it show any prompt at the end of the code?

If the keyboard is working at that point try typing

/sbin/fsck -fy

Then after it finishes checking the startup drive, type

reboot

And see if that helps.

If it is not starting up into single user mode, try starting from either an external drive or installer DVD and run disk utility to repair disk, and also run permissions repair. Barring that you may want to consider reinstalling the OS (clean install is best if you can). It looks like a very badly corrupted something. Hopefully not hardware...

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Answer 3

A H1

Level 1

53 points

Jan 18, 2014 10:05 AM in response to A H1

I just managed to look at the blowup of the error message. Seems like something happens when one of the CPU is accessed. Some addressing problem.

To rule out bad hardware can you try starting up using an external hard drive (connect external drive with a working OS on it, then power up while holding the option key. Then choose the external drive to boot). Or the OS installer DVD (insert DVD then power on while holding "c" key). I guess you could also try to boot from the recovery partition (hold down option key when booting and select "recovery" hard drive icon)

If the machine boots reliably using any of the external HDD/DVD sources, then you need to reinstall the OS on your startup drive. Run disk repair just in case your HDD is having sector problems.

If booting from sources other than your startup drive doesn't fix the issue, then it's most likely a hardware problem. Either RAM went bad, or something worse. Dunno.

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