1st Gen MacPro start up issue - will not always start

[NickyD]

Hi,

I have one of the first generation Intel Xeon Mac Pros (quad core, 2,66 Ghz I think). and in the last two days, I've been having some problems on startup...the power comes on, but the system never starts. If I turn the power on and off a few times, I can eventually get it to work.

Is this something easily repairable? My Apple Care ran out and I didnt renew it. If this is a costly fix, is it possible to buy a *new* bare bones Mac Pro and just swap the hard drives from my first one?

I looked on other threads with similar issues, but they all seem related to the NVidia 8800 crd, but I have an ATI X1900 installed by Apple.

Thanks for any advice you can give me!

 

[shroud]

hard to say but it could be your video card also. If you have had kernel panics in the past then the resulting log could give us a clue as to what may be your problem.

You can find the log if you open up your hard drive icon and then open up the folder called library. In library is another folder called logs and within it should be a file called 'panic.log'. If you open the log file then just copy and paste the contents into this thread. (Just make sure that you are using the library in the hard drive/system and not in your user folder)

If you have many logged reports to copy then you can just copy the last reported error. Each error starts with a date and time and should end with a bunch of these: *********

Also, have you done anything lately to the computer such as add a pci card, change cables, etc? What version of the OS are you running?

 

[bangonadrum]

Does it not start at all unless you keep power cycling or is it just taking a long time? When I got my new octo, it took several minutes just to get to the Apple logo - one screen would be lit grey, the other left blank.

But, what had happened was that the USB hub in one of the displays was having problems and causing the Mac to stick in the boot self-test for ages.

Try unplugging all USB peripherals but the keyboard and see if that changes how the machine boots up. It may well not be a USB problem but if nothing else has changed on the machine, my first target would be a failing USB hub or peripheral.

 

[NickyD]

Well I am running OSX 10.5.6, I haven't changed anything on my Mac at all. I did take the vid card out two weeks ago to spray the dust out of it.

The panic log doesn't show anything out of the ordinary, nor does the crash reporter at the times where my startup failed.

(I did notice some logs of something called by vmware which I have never used since trying the demo a coupe of years ago...but they are at odd times when I am not suing my computer, so I don't think they would have anythign to do with the startup issues.)

I guess it must be the video card since the symptoms are the same as that described by others...I just wish somebody else with an ATIX1900 would report the same problem.

Thanks for your help!