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A Tale Of Woe About My Mac Pro

Hello, Early 2008 Mac Pro is refusing to start up.


A few days ago whilst doing nothing more than using Safari, the whole machine locked up, clock stopped, unable to use Force Quit,

machine totally unresponsive. So had to shutdown by pressing and holding the power button. Since then it has been unable to start up.


Once the Power button has been pressed, we get the whoosh of the fans, the bong, then a grey screen appears with the Apple logo

and then the progress bar begins to move, and gets to about a quarter of the way forward and stops, hangs for about two minutes and then

just goes to back to a grey screen.


It will not boot in Safe mode. It will not boot into Recovery mode. It will not boot from the original Install disk 1 (or by pressing C)

If I press the Option key, I get to see all my Startup disks, two Yosemite, one Mavericks, one Lion, and their corresponding

Recovery drives, and the install disk, but which ever one I select I get the same result, or should i say no result.


I have done NVRAM resets and SMC resets, this does not improve things.


I can get it to start up by pressing D and going through the AHT, and it passes all tests. So interesting it can boot from the Install disk in that way

but not if I press C.


It will start in Single User mode, and I can run fsck, and it reports that the disk is ok, but still won't boot on exit.

It will start up in Verbose mode, and here it reports some unusual items.

I get a SAM multimedia read write error which I think is the Superdrive.

I get SMC errors with varying text which I don't understand, and doesn't stay on screen long enough for me to write down.

And most unusual is the listing of the CPU's and their Cores numbering.

Again I can't remember the entire text, but the list at the top of the page starts with

processor ID 0 and the line opposite confirms 0

this goes on as 1 to 1 etc till we get to 4 which now has a pair of 5 in the list

and 5 has 4, 6 has 7 and 7 has 6.


With door off I can see that the two RAM boards leds flash briefly on start up so no error there. If I press the Diagnostic button on the Logic board

I get a Yellow light on number 2 (which I think is normal), and Green lights on 6,7 and 8, which again I think is normal. All fans are working, at a normal speed and quietly.


I have managed to get it to go into Target mode and hooked it up to another Mac. firstly some of the disks did not show up, but after using disk utility

verifying and repairing faults, (bitmap errors, and incorrect journal count) all four disks (and partitions) in the MacPro can be seen and read, and written to.

I hooked up the MacPro to a 13 year old QuickSilver 800 which has not been used in 7 years and sat in a box away from any power. It booted up first time

knew exactly what date and time it was, and it even knew it was BST, it was not on the internet at the time either. I was amazed. so without the help of my old G4, I wouldn't be writing this.


So if anybody is still awake after all this rambling, I would dearly appreciate any other ideas as to why this Mac Pro is no go.

Are there any other procedures I can perform to try and discover what is preventing my MP from starting. Is there anything obvious I am missing.

Please let me know. All help gratefully received.


Thanks in advance.

Mac Pro (Early 2008), OS X Yosemite (10.10), 6Gb Ram Nvidea 8800GT

Posted on May 25, 2015 10:01 PM

Reply
6 replies

May 26, 2015 3:02 AM in response to Eau Rouge

So I finally got it to start in Safe mode, but only on one disk the one with the Lion installation, the yosemite and mavericks disks just halted midway through.


so when it booted to the lion disk the screen is a lovely pink/magenta colour in places and riddled with screen artifacts. So i conclude it must be the Graphics card.


Next question is what is a good replacement for the Nvidea 8800 GT, at a reasonable cost, and available in the UK


Any help would be great.


Ta

May 26, 2015 11:21 AM in response to Eau Rouge

It was a thought. Sorry.

Though there is a very low possibility 4 drives could go bad at once. Power surge/brownout??


FWIW- I tried to use a double boot disk on my early 2008 Mac Pro. It was a drive with 2 patrons, one SL and one Mavericks. After using it this way for a while I got the distinct impression the computer was mixing OS's. Can't say there was any one thing that I found problematic. I just kept seeing things happen that seemed now OS was working when I was booted into the other. Went back to a single OS on one drive and that nonsense went away.


Good luck getting going again.


Jerry

May 27, 2015 10:26 AM in response to Johnb-one

if you can get a good deal on a 7950 that might work. you could try macbooty.com or Macupgrades.co.uk for some ideas

you may not wish to take into your local iFruit store for graphics card fitting... I believe their policy is same to same , eg; if you have a dead 8800GT

they will fit a working 8800GT in there, but you will be paying their price for that

fitting in a new card isn't too tricky.....


cheers



JB

A Tale Of Woe About My Mac Pro

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