My Mac Pro beeps eight times on startup, then boots to the recovery partition. The eight beeps come in four sets of two. I haven't found any reference to this anywhere. Suggestions? Thanks!
Mac Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)
The most common problem with a Mac Pro 42 lb silver tower that does that is "not enough working RAM Memory to start up". This article makes some references to that:
Mac computers: About startup tones - Apple Support
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Thanks for the info, Grant. I'm familiar with the RAM issues. Usually with RAM issues, the machine doesn't boot at all. This will boot to the recovery partition. The beeps come 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8.
To boot up Mac OS X, you used to need at least 96MBytes working.
There never used to be anything smaller around except Single-User mode, where you get a Terminal Command-Line instead of a login screen. Occasionally users would get that.
Recovery_HD has only a small kernel, and can probably boot in far less. So you may be seeing this now because of a partial failure -- leaving a little RAM still working. If you were to invoke terminal from there, I expect there is a Terminal command that would tell you how much RAM is in the machine, but I don't know it by heart. The top command will tell you that among a host of other things similar to the information in Activity Monitor.
I was able to get a proper boot by choosing my startup disk from the Recovery Partition. Still don't know what the mystery beeps mean, but I appreciate the help!
8 beeps on startup...
