iMac Pro restarting because of a problem?

Hardware test never show any problems. I'm confused that Apple have problem to fix this issue. Very strange. Don't they really understand their new iMacPro mother board design? :-D I believe it's not harware anyway, it's something in macOS that don't play clean with this new mother board. I put my money on firmware & hope for a specific update for iMac Pro soon, probably a strange firmware update with many restarts meanwhile updating. :-)

I'm i a better mood today & give Apple 2 weeks for this, if not I return the macine and say goodbuy to iMacPro for this time.

Just wanted to add to the list really - same issue. Brand new base model iMac Pro, less than a week old. Took maybe three days to install all my Adobe CC software, video editing apps, Logic Pro etc etc (including creating templates for various bits of work). Long & short - lots of installs, reboots, full overnight shutdowns before I had it up and running and started to use 'sleep'. Seeing the same panic crashes as everyone else, even with nothing running before putting the thing to sleep.

I do have a LaCie D2 plugged in, using a thunderbolt 3 adapter (Apple branded). What I've also seen is that the LaCie is repeatedly spinning up during sleep (whereas with my old iMac 2012, it would stay asleep with the Mac). It knows the iMac is sleeping, so does its own power down cycle, and the blue light goes off. In less than 5 seconds, it gets woken by what can only be some activity on the thunderbolt port, and it spins back up again ... then goes straight back into its power off cycle. Once off, 5 seconds pass, then it's back on again ... and so on, and so on.

So I'm not only bothered about an almost £5,000 new computer that constantly crashes in sleep, but also my main external drive which is being spun up and down in an endless cycle during sleep too.

I'm having to power down every time now; this pains me, as this thing is a workstation-class bit of hardware that should be good to leave on (rendering animation for example) for long periods without worry of any issues. I want to be excited by having got one of there expensive new Pro models, but I'm disappointed within the first week.

Not good form, Apple ...

My iMac Pro (second one) don't randomly shut down/restart sinece I started to choose "no sleep" in energy settings (it's on 24/7). I'm in production now and I will use this one 11 month (still can get a new one first year) - IF Apple havn't fixed this issue untill then. I will get a new one...and do the same with that one, use it for 11 month. Maybe I can get a new iMacPro every year for a decade...just because they are to lazy to fix the problem. :-D

Sunday, May 13, 2018

Same problem here, since last update to 10.13.4.

Now installing the Security Update 20018-001.

Perhaps this will help.

High Sierra v10.13.4 (17E199) on a new (late 2017) iMac Pro, 3.2 HGz Intel Xeon W, 1Tb SSD (APFS)

I had the same problem, with the same error codes. Disabling "put hard disks to sleep", as suggested by our local mac admin, and in another reply here, has stopped it from happening.

Our theory is that it has to do with the SSD encryption not playing well with hard disk sleep. One idea is that the operating system wakes up quicker than the security hardware, and accesses the disk before it has been "unlocked". The system sees random garbage and crashes.

So waiting for an Apple fix, it would seem that some users can stop it from happening by disabling "put hard disks to sleep". Since it's an SSD, putting it "to sleep" is gibberish anyways.

I have the same issue like all of you; Apple engineering saying it is a faulty video card in my iMac Pro. Has anyone else gotten this answer and did the new motherboard (video card embedded into motherboard) fix the problem?

I haven't been contacted by the engineers yet, busy time I assume, Apple Care guy said he'd contact me again by Tuesday. Anyway, I installed the OS update. I'm on 10.13.5 now. Ran the test. And saw the iMac pro freeze up again after seven minutes or so. No fix.

This is what I'm going to do: there is a high probability engineering will advice me to replace the iMac Pro. Let's call it a hunch. I made a deal at the store that any new iMac Pro, would be tested on site. So, if it freezes up: take it back, gimme another one. Every. Single. Time. Until they give me one that does the job or they give me my money back.

They agreed.

So... let's see how far this adventure will take me. Software fix? New iMac? Second New iMac? Third? Or money in my hands (final stage). That would mean the iMac Pro is indeed a mutilated creation. Let's hope it's not.

mc22cc wrote:

... I have sent 4 files x2 separate times to Apple engineering (4 gigs each time) ...

Which is why I have to rely on you and others here to work out a solution with Apple... uploading a 4 GB file would take over 15 hours at the pitiful CenturyLink speeds available to me... I do have the Vega 64 ...

Just wanted to update a bit. Today I installed the 10.13.5 update, and got an extra update message "A software update is required to use this Startup disk".

I have now re-ticked the "put hard disks to sleep"-option, which previously was a guaranteed way to get a "0xc0dec" Bridge-OS panic on the next sleep on my machine. It has now been running with that option ticked for more than 7 hours, which is a world record for this machine. It also makes sense that the bug was startup-disk-related.

There _might_ be hope!

Have you others gotten the extra startup-disk-related software update?

For what it’s worth, there seem to be a lot of threads discussing different instances of what might be the same thing.

My experience was purchasing a base model iMac Pro a couple of months ago. I had multiple Kernel Panic crashes in the first week, mainly overnight or just after auto-sleeping. Even straight out of the box with no added software. No Parallels, no Chrome, no Compressor etc etc. Would return to the room my iMac Pro is in, to find it awaiting login after a restart, with the ‘shut down because of a problem’ message, and logs mentioning Bridge etc.

At the same time, I did a boot into Diagnostic mode, and checked the SSD, resulting in several ‘Crypto_Val’ errors. These messages didn’t occur if I checked the SSD from within OSX/Disk Utility - only ever in boot diagnostics.

One LaCie external Thunderbolt drive would continue to spin up and down, endlessly, even during sleep - as if something was continually waking it.

The last thing is that my machine won’t ‘remember’ the display brightness settings after a full reboot. I set it at 50%, but it always reverts to 90% after a reboot (but retains 50% coming out of sleep).

I made a full back-up using time machine, then fully wiped the SSD and restored High Sierra from Internet Recovery (NB Not from the recovery partition of the SSD, or the Time Machine backup; I didn’t select the SSD encryption options either). I then reinstalled all files and apps from Time Machine.

After the restore, I turned off File Vault, and Power Nap, as many users suggested. OS at the time was HS 10.13.4 (upgraded from 10.13.3 which was the install version), plus the subsequent security patch.

Since that time - maybe 4-5 weeks now - I’ve had no Crypto_Val errors showing in boot diagnostics, no Kernel Panics or sleep crashes. The LaCie now sleeps when the iMac Pro is sleeping.

Just updated to 10.13.5 on release (didn’t see any message about using the Startup Disk etc as per Viktor’s post), and since then have re-enabled Power Nap with no additional issues.

For me, everything seems to be working as expected, with the one exception of the display brightness setting - it still reverts to 90% after every full reboot.

John,

The 10.13.5 update ran as usual. On first startup after the normal update I got a popup with the message "A software update is required to use this Startup disk." The only two options was to update (I never wrote down the exact text on the button, but I seem to remember it actually saying "Update disk" - not certain though) or to select another startup disk.

When I chose "update", I was informed that reboots would follow, and that the screen would be completely black for up to several minutes. A second update started, and since the final startup after that my machine has been running without Bridge-OS panics.

My feeling was that the 10.13.5 OS checked my disk on startup and determined that a special update was required for it.

This is my experience of the update so far. Of course, my machine might crash as soon as I have hit "Reply" on this message. Can't promise you anything... :-)

They are still working the problem over here. I demonstrated the crash/restart two days in a row and I finally uploaded the videofiles that made the computer crash/restart. What they are doing now, or will be doing in the very near future, is duplicate this event on a similar setup (using my videofiles) so that they can further analyse the problem.

So, we are still in the middle of the investigation.

Mc22cc: Now that they have told you something's up with the videocard, what do they advice you to do? It was obviously shipped to you this way. Do they see this as a thing that can happen to a machine, or do they think it's a potential problem every iMac pro with a Vega64-card can have? What did they advice you to do?

Chances are the engineers are going to arrive to the same conclusion in my case. My only hope is they will be able to duplicate the problem on their own machine. If that's the case, it will be the beginning of their own search for the cause of this problem. Bad hardware (AMD) or bad software (the OS)...

They did not say INvisibleArt, but I am so glad to hear your about your troubleshooting. That is the million dollar question is it hardware or OS. I think you test by engineers with your files will give us the answer. My answer was "the engineers see it is video card" and I read somewhere that new video cards (not stocked; old video cards) were the answer. Anxiously waiting your results. Please let us know what you find out. My logic board with video card is not in stock right now and I am waiting for tech service to get the board to replace mine. Not looking forward to that solution since it will mean I have to transfer all my files from Time Machine. I hope that is easy process.

It's a very easy process indeed. Just make sure that before you send your Mac in for repairs you 1. Make the TM backup and 2. You deactivate every license on every piece of software you're using (just the software you had to activate of course)

We have had a lot of unfortunate experience with this issue on multiple iMac Pros right up to yesterday 22 June. This remains a serious problem and these do not appear to be isolated incidents. Compare my notes below with previous reports in this thread these panic/restarts and I believe we can almost certainly conclude this is an APPLE problem vs a problem caused by user files, third party software or third party peripherals.

We have just yesterday identified a possible mitigating workaround (see my last paragraph). It doesn't STOP the panics, however it appears to consistently reduce the frequency with which they occur.

iMac Pro USERS: PLEASE HELP us isolate the problem!

• If you've experienced this problem and it's been fixed by Apple or yourself please speak up and tell us what caused or fixed the problem and how you got Apple to take action.

• If you still have this problem please tell me your screen saver and display-sleep settings.

• If you still have this problem please speak up, tell the rest of us and PRESS APPLE TO DO SOMETHING!

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Summary of our iMac Pro experience:

• Identical problem "day one, out-of-the-box" with three new base-config iMac Pros 20 May-22 June, 2018.

• The panic/restart problem has been verified to occur at least 2-3 times on each of the three new iMac Pros with ZERO 3rd-party apps and NO external peripherals attached.

• The problem persists even AFTER we fully erased the internal SSD and reinstalled a fresh copy of the latest version of MacOS (10.13.5) from the Apple internet "Recovery" server. After the first sign of panic problems we did not attempt to restore from a backup or migrate from another Mac. These were 100% virgin configurations.

• In our normal configuration with our usual Apple and third-party apps and peripherals install the panics increase from 1-3 times per day to as often as 3-9 times per hour, i.e. these iMac Pros are unstable and totally unusable for production (or much of anything, really).

• Although we have in every case had these panics occur within the first two hours of setup and use AppleCare's initial response was to put us through 1-2 hours of troubleshooting then ask us to either take the units to an Apple Store (90 minute drive) and wait 10-20 days for repair or ship the unit to Apple and wait up to 21 days for repair or replacement.

• Advance replacement required PAYING another $5000 (or a bank card hold--same thing really) to have a new unit shipped, then waiting a week or two for Apple to receive the defective unit and get a refund. We're short of iMacs anyway, so we PURCHASED a second iMac Pro. It immediately failed with the identical problem.

• At that point (three weeks after the initial purchase and after 14 hours of troubleshooting including 4+ hours talking to AppleCare) I pitched a fit and asked the nice, dedicated-but-powerless AppleCare Senior Advisor to connect me to Apple Corporate / Consumer Affairs. This very quickly changed the picture: the CA person listened patiently to my story, asked a few questions (including verifying that the manufacture date was the first week of Dec, 2017) then offered to replace the original iMac Pro purchased three weeks earlier with one that was "fresh inventory". He expedited shipment to an Apple Store and it was received there in about three business days. (Actually picking it up was a horrible experience, but I'll give the Store people a pass on that as their key people did their best to be helpful once I got there).

• The replacement iMac Pro A.) was NOT "fresh stock"; like the first two it was made on about 1 December, 2017 probably the first week of iMac Pro production, and it B.) FAILED WITHIN TWO HOURS. Same panic & restart.

I certainly appreciate the efforts of the AppleCare advisors and the intervention of the Consumer Affairs agent who expedited this last replacement, HOWEVER:

• The identical problem has been reported by a significant number of users for more than six months. It's bad enough Apple has not yet resolved the issue, but it adds insult to injury when we're given NO meaningful information about the root cause... and when new examples of this old problem are treated as though the store Geniuses and AppleCare advisors are hearing about the issue for the first time.

• I'm amazed at the patience most of the customers on this thread are exhibiting. Most of you sound like pro users. How can you afford this? We've lost dozens of hours of billable time struggling with this issue the past four weeks, I've now paid my IT support staff several thousand dollars to troubleshoot brand new $5000 iMacs and run around dealing with replacements, setting temporary workstations and at least 40 time-consuming 5-800GB backups and restores. Any way I look at this it has not been a good customer experience.

CONFIGURATION

Our standard iMac Pro peripheral configuration:

2, 3 or 4 external displays:

A.) One LG 5K Ultrafine 27" + one or two LG 4k Ultrafine 22"

B.) Two LG 5K Ultrafine 27"

C.) Four LG 4k Ultrafine 22"

External Storage:

• 2-4 Samsung T5 USB-C SSDs, 500GB or 1TB

• 0-2 Promise Pegasus R3 Thunderbolt 3 RAID drives

• Time Machine backups to Drobo 5n2 or Apple TimeCapsule

• Apple High Sierra file sharing via 1 or 10Gb ethernet

Network:

• Meraki 1 or 10Gb switching

• Meraki 4x4 SU/MU-MIMO multi-gigabit 802.11ac up to 160MHz channels. (It's not clear to us if the iMac Pro supports half those specs as Apple stopped publishing full WiFi specs even for the Pro).

Please note once more that the panics occur even with NO external displays or storage and with standard 1Gb ethernet, so there is no pointing to our hi-spec configuration as the culprit, however the frequency of the panics appears to increase significantly when we add our peripherals.

MY CONCLUSION

• Apple does not appear to have a timely solution for this problem. We need working iMacs and we don't have these panic / restart problems with BTO i7 non-pro iMacs, therefore we may need to give up and return these iMac Pros.

• We've just now tested a single, recently-built 14-core Vega 64 BTO iMac Pro. It does not appear to have the same panic problem as the three 8-core base models, but this is not conclusive as we only tested it in our configuration for a day. (It also appears to be SLOWER that both the 8-core Pro and the non-pro i7 iMac on Photoshop and InDesign, so there's no way to justify the extra $3-4k cost for the users for whom we bought the base iMac Pros for nothing more than to get iMac Pros that actually work.)

• Yesterday (22 June, 2018) we identified a possible mitigating workaround involving the standard Apple screen saver. The problematic iMac Pros were set to start the screen after 5 minutes. (This may be the factory default setting--I've not verified that.) We noticed that the panic restarts frequently occur when the user walks away from the iMac Pro, so we watched what happens and found a strong correlation between the screen saver coming on in 5 minutes and the frequent panic /restarts. Two base-model iMac Pros (including the one just replaced by Apple) that were restarting 3-9 times per hour did not have a panic/restart at all in the first 24 hours after the screen saver was set to start in 60 minutes. When I reset one to 5 minutes and left it idle it had a panic in about 5 minutes. The other restarted a few minutes later while still set to start screen saver in 60 minutes, so this workaround doesn't necessarily STOP the panics. However, it may consistently reduce the frequency with which they occur. Note that we normally also set all our Macs to "Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off" and "Turn off display after 60 minutes". We've not yet experimented with changing those settings.