Mac Pro Freeze & Desktop Reset to Default

Question

Level 1

5 points

Mac Pro Freeze & Desktop Reset to Default

Hello,

I have a Mac Pro from late 2013 running High Sierra 10.13.3. I am having a problem where the video display will freeze and I am forced to hard reset my Mac by holding the power button down. If I happen to be on a VoIP call my call continues fine (I can hear them and they can hear me) however the mouse won't move or if it does move. When I am forced to hard reset my Mac Pro it always reverts one or more desktops to the default autumn hillside by a river whereas I prefer a "solid color" black setting. I've surfed the forums and cannot seem to find the root cause.

Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

MDBik

Mac Pro, iOS 10.3.3

Posted on Mar 15, 2018 3:00 AM

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Answer 1

chuck_3rd

Community Specialist

Mar 15, 2018 7:06 PM in response to MDBik

Hi MDBik!

I understand that your Mac is freezing, and I'm happy to help. To start, please try performing the following resets to see if they fix the issue:

How to reset the System Management Controller (SMC) on your Mac

How to reset NVRAM on your Mac

Cheers!

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Answer 2

Mar 26, 2018 6:37 AM in response to MDBik

Exactly.

I went here:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208202

Downloaded Sierra and created a bootable thumb drive. I did this yesterday and tested the system as I typically would, and didn’t run into any freezing or locks.

Hope it works for you!

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Answer 3

MDBik Author

Level 1

5 points

Mar 19, 2018 12:25 PM in response to chuck_3rd

Sadly neither of these appear to have fixed my problem. Had two freezes today.

On both freezes today I could move my mouse and see it move on the screen however I could not interact with anything on the screen.

I don't know if it matters but on every restart, crash or not, one of my desktops reverts to the default background while the others remain black.

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Answer 4

MDBik Author

Level 1

5 points

Mar 21, 2018 2:07 AM in response to MDBik

Yesterday morning, after another lock up, I decided to go into recovery mode and completely wipe out my Mac Pro. I formatted the hard drive, did a clean install of High Sierra, reinstalled office/outlook and a few other things. Within an hour after I finished the rebuild it locked up on me again. I have no idea what's causing this since I'm still able to move the mouse.

Model Name: Mac Pro

Model Identifier: MacPro6,1

Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5

Processor Speed: 3.7 GHz

Number of Processors: 1

Total Number of Cores: 4

L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB

L3 Cache: 10 MB

Memory: 16 GB

Boot ROM Version: MP61.0120.B00

SMC Version (system): 2.20f18

Illumination Version: 1.4a6

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Answer 5

Mar 21, 2018 8:38 AM in response to MDBik

If you are experiencing Kernel Panics, the panic data are saved in Non-Volatile RAM. As soon as your Mac is up and running again, the panic data are turned into a report and stored at:

/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports

... In a report with Date&Time and the word "panic" in the name.

If you find such reports there, post the latest one here, and readers can help you figure out what went wrong.

Please do NOT post Application crash reports -- they are very long and have no System debugging information in them.

There are different steps to follow if none are found, so please post back.

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Answer 6

Davey-

Level 1

4 points

Apr 13, 2018 4:14 PM in response to MDBik

To anyone who has this same problem, do NOT bother with the boilerplate fixes which will take you forever and cause you to lose everything. The D300 freezing issue is well known, google it, and Apple have refused to help us. They replaced the hardware for the D500 and D700 users. just not us...

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