Mac Pro stuck at Gray boot screen but will boot XP

OK so I am a bit confused here. Upon trying to boot in Leopard my Mac Pro will get the the gray loading screen with the "loading circle" and just sit there forever. Than after a bit it will just stop and the whole computer can shut itself down.

I just installed the 8800gt upgrade kit last week, and have had no problems at all for the past week.

The only thing that changed that may be related is the 8800GT XP Driver. I installed the latest beta driver for it under XP in boot camp because it wasn't working properly with the default boot camp drivers.

So I can correctly boot in the XP via boot camp, but trying to boot in Leopard it just hangs at the gray loading screen. Can anyone help me out here please. XP is fine for the occassional game, but I don't want to be stuck here forvever!

Oh boy.

Just tried booting into both safe mode and booting from the leopard install disc and the original Mac Pro system install discs. Trying to boot into safe mode did nothing, hangs again and the shuts down and restarts.

Trying to boot from the two discs produced the dark grey box that says my machine encountered and error and needs to be hard restarted. Nothing!

I was hoping to boot into the disk utility but I can't even do that. Everything was running fine before this morning before I rebooted into XP. Gahh this stinks.

I'm beginning to suspect that it may be the hard drive, because my boot camp volume is a totally different hard drive and boots fine.

Its weird tho, I have had hard drives give out on me on some windows machines and I was able to tell when they were on their way out (weird noises, eratic behavior etc). But this drive showed no sign of that. I've had the Mac Pro since may and havent even put that much stress on it.

I'm going to keep working at it, but is there any sure fire way for me to tell if the HD has crashed? hows up for me to boot from when I hold alt at boot.


"Edit"

Oh god, just booted into XP and the 8800GT is running like a Vacuum cleaner. This can't be good.

Hehe, I know!

Well I just started the Mac Pro in Target Disk mode and plugged it into my old 12 inch powerbook, My Air won't cut it here .

WHen I have it in target disk mode the Volume with my OS X install does not even show up. I have 2 internal disks, one for OS X and then another that is partitioned as a part time machine and part boot camp volume. The only volumes showing up in Target Disk Mode are the Time Machine and Boot Camp Volumes. The OS X Volume is nowhere to be found.

Is it most likely that this thing is fried? I'm going to try and reseat it, but im sure that wont do much.

Mr. Hammond I think we're back in business!


So I managed to see the OS X volume under disk utility while it was attached to my powerbook. I ran both verify and repair disk, then rebooted and Im back in my Mac Pro and everything seems to be working fine. I'm kind of tip toeing around because Im still scared of the worst, but I've got Time Machine backups if things go haywire.

I'm going to copy and paste the verify and repair logs, just in case you guys can see anything in the tests that would have caused my problem, or even something that I should be aware of. The first part is when I just ran Verify disk. And the second part is when I ran Verify and Repair.

Verify Disk

Verifying volume “Macintosh HD”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Missing thread record (id = 6092631)
Incorrect number of thread records
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 849596 instead of 849601)
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Invalid leaf record count
(It should be 9114 instead of 9123)
Checking volume bitmap.
Volume Bit Map needs minor repair
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume free block count
(It should be 20859670 instead of 22290255)
Volume Header needs minor repair
The volume Macintosh HD needs to be repaired.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit


1 HFS volume checked
Volume needs repair



Repair Disk

Verify and Repair disk “Macintosh HD”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Invalid leaf record count
(It should be 9114 instead of 9123)
Checking volume bitmap.
Volume Bit Map needs minor repair
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 849601 instead of 838072)
Invalid volume directory count
(It should be 193524 instead of 192092)
Invalid volume free block count
(It should be 20859670 instead of 22290255)
Volume Header needs minor repair
Repairing volume.
Rechecking volume.
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 849601 instead of 849596)
Repairing volume.
Rechecking volume.
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
The volume Macintosh HD was repaired successfully.

1 HFS volume checked
Repair attempted on 1 volume
1 HFS volume repaired