My Mac Pro is doing weird things. What is the current equivalent of rebuilding the desktop and zapping the pram?

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My Mac Pro is doing weird things. What is the current equivalent of rebuilding the desktop and zapping the pram?

My Mac Pro (Early 2008) is in need of something, like what used to be called Rebuilding the Desktop and zapping the pram in the "old days" (pre-OS X). But I understand you can't do that anymore, and I need to find out what to do to get it right again. Whenever it goes into screen saver mode, it's fine, but after a certain amount of time it'll go to sleep mode, and when it does that, it's like the whole thing shuts down, and the next time I try to wake it up, it restarts itself. That's happened 3 times already today. Also, it's doing weird things in Mail and a few of my other apps. Also, my Airport Utility shows my wifi connection is fine, and my Airport Express and modem both show green lights, but for some reason my iPad and my iPhone both refuse to recognize the signal. They were both fine yesterday. I've tried restarting and repairing permissions and restarting again several times now, and that doesn't seem to help anything. Any help anyone can give will be very gratefully appreciated!

Mac Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.2), 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon

Posted on Jul 1, 2015 1:25 PM

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Answer 1

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Jul 1, 2015 1:48 PM in response to Valerie Anderson

While you can still those things I think you need somethng else.

Also the 2008's and OEM graphic card have some power management issues.

A clean install or restoring from a known good system, or boot from a working clone?

To save some trouble, when it freezes do a Safe Boot - but only AFTER you : boot into Recovery Mode and Repair Disk; or, boot from a 2nd system drive and do same; or as last result use Single User Mode and run fsck - and then follow up with Safe Mode.

Download Etrecheck, run and paste results - normally I would NOT use or make changes to a system drive that is unreliable.

I think you are in need of a clean install, especially so if you upgraded to Yosemite.

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Answer 2

Jul 1, 2015 2:12 PM in response to The hatter

Thanks for your reply. I did just upgrade to Yosemite in the last few months, and it took some time to get all my other apps updated and working right again, but since then it's been doing just fine until today. I'm sorry if I sound kinda dense, but I'm no computer guru, and unfortunately a lot of what you said sounds kinda like Greek to me. What it's been doing, shutting down when it goes into sleep mode, I don't know that it's shut down until I hit a key to wake it up, and then I hear the chimes and know that it's restarting itself, so how are you supposed to do a safe boot or boot into Recovery Mode in that situation? If you could possibly send a link to whatever information Apple has in its system as to the things you mention above, it would probably help me. Thanks for whatever help you can send.

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Answer 3

Jul 1, 2015 3:06 PM in response to Valerie Anderson

Hold down the Shift key as you start up. This invokes Safe mode, which does a bunch of things you needed to do anyway. It should say Safe Mode in Red, if it does not, then Restart and hold down the Shift key again.

It takes about five minutes and puts up a progress bar (which only goes about 1/3 of the way across) while it does the equivalent of Disk Utility (Repair Disk) on your Boot Drive, which is more complicated to do any other way. Then it loads a minimal set of Apple-only extensions (NOT including display acceleration) and asks for your Username and Password -- even if you normally auto-login. Screen re-Draw will be SLOW, and a few obscure things may not work properly. It will be using default settings for as much stuff as it can, such as screen resolution.

Use this opportunity to poke around if you need to. You may also want to run Disk Utility (Repair Permissions) if you have any Applications that are being cranky about starting up. You can re-set any settings, and as long as you are careful to Save, they will persist.

When you Restart again, Startup will take slightly longer, because the extensions cache is rebuilt for you.

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Answer 4

Jul 1, 2015 6:33 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Thank you so much, Grant, for your good instructions. I did what you said and everything appears to be fine again. I've noted it for future use. Much appreciated!

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