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