Hi. I am new to the Mac world. My brand new Mac Pro
is frozen. All I can do is move my mouse. Cannot
click on anything. Command-Option-Esc brings up the
Force Quit Applications window, but nothing on screen
but Finder.
Also, a manual restart does not work.
Any ideas?
Thanks.
Hello All:
Hopefully, somebody out there is still watching this thread, because my Mac Pro experiences have been similar, and I have been trying to wrestle "Random Freezes from Hades" that leave me with nothing but the mouse and an unresponsive Finder/Force Quit. Since it's been happening for quite sometime now, I have taken copious notes and keep returning to the theory that I am having a hardware overheat issue, but am open to other ideas, as I am back in the Apple world after a 20 year hiatus (my last Apple was a IIc!).
Here is a summary of the details I encounter:
- Randomly, I'll try to open another app and be entertained by a bouncing icon, but no app opens. One symptom that tells me the issue is coming is that the magnification animation on the Dock becomes VERY choppy.
- The mouse cursor shortly thereafter becomes my new best friend I have come to name, "The Spinning Pinwheel of Despair".
- Subsequent attempts to open other apps or even Finder to Force Quit go unopened. Waiting eight hours has no effect, either.
Here are some other fun facts about my situation:
- Depending on how the machine feels after I power it down, it may reboot to the OS, or will give me a post-BIOS screen with a folder and flashing question mark (no Boot Device found).
- Usually, if I let it sit for a long period of time, the above symptom is not observed, which sends me in the direction of a heat issue (time allowing whatever is heating up to cool down).
Other thoughts and observations:
- When I say this thing is random, I mean totally
RANDOM. I can play Doom 3, edit an iMovie, and create an iDVD with no issues. Other times, I will open a PDF and have it happen right away.
- Booting to a CD as suggested before sometimes works and other times doesn't. As a matter of fact, I was willing to bite the bullet when it first happened, scrub the OS and rebuild, but couldn't even get through the disk erase part. Literally, I couldn't get the Disk Utility to wipe the drive! Good thing, because the OS is probably not the issue here.
- Tech Tool (the one that ships with AppleCare) offers nothing. I'm not surprised, because if this is a heat issue, a point-in-time snapshot of hardware performance won't do much.
The real key here, and I hate to sound like a PC bigot (because I'm not), is that Apple doesn't publish a utility that I may be missing that can give me some
HARDCORE perspective of the hardware's performance; particularly BIOS-fed information like motherboard and video card temperatures. These apps are pretty prevalent on the PC side because of the overclocking crowd, but Apple seems to want to reserve this kind of info for the Xserve user via the LOM function.
I welcome anybody who can offer me insight into my situation. Like I said previously, I have AppleCare on the thing so getting Apple to step in is easy, but I'd like to try and fix it myself first if I can avoid dragging it to an Authorized Repair Center - I have become addicted to OS X and my 23" Cinema Display 🙂.
Take care.
DP
Intel Mac Pro Mac OS X (10.4.8) 
