Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Emergency MacPro HELP! PLEASE!

darthraige

darthraige

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Aug 8, 2007
1,612
2
Coruscant, but Boston will do.
My new MacPro has been working flawlessly for 4 months. I decide to bring it to work and it won't start up at all. It just hangs on the gray apple screen with the thingy spinning. Any way around this? This is really making me mad. Not sure why it would be doing this. Any suggestions would be great! :(

-Raige
 
bokdol said:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304123

try this out see if this helps. also if you hole down otion on start up it should show available boot drives. see if your drive shows up. if not use your start up disk and run disk utility
Click to expand...

Tried that. Didn't work. :( The drive shows up when I hold down the option key, is there a way to get to disk utility without the DVD install disc? When I connect a FireWire cable to another computer I can see all the disks. I'm wondering if I can run disk utility on the other computer to try and repair??
 
darthraige said:
My new MacPro has been working flawlessly for 4 months. I decide to bring it to work and it won't start up at all. It just hangs on the gray apple screen with the thingy spinning. Any way around this? This is really making me mad. Not sure why it would be doing this. Any suggestions would be great! :(

-Raige
Click to expand...

I have had a similar problem with my iMac. Sometimes OSX does not like the peripherals you have plugged in. In my case it was an iPod and after that was external speakers. So, try this.. unplug everything possible and power up. With the Pro the culprit may be an internal HD, so you may try removing all but the boot drive and see if it powers up. Then, if that works power down and plug them back in 1 at a time.
 
OddThomas said:
I have had a similar problem with my iMac. Sometimes OSX does not like the peripherals you have plugged in. In my case it was an iPod and after that was external speakers. So, try this.. unplug everything possible and power up. With the Pro the culprit may be an internal HD, so you may try removing all but the boot drive and see if it powers up. Then, if that works power down and plug them back in 1 at a time.
Click to expand...

You don't think it could be the fact it's looking for the new aluminum keyboard, do ya? That would be really strange. I will try that after repairing the disk.
 
darthraige said:
Tried that. Didn't work. :( The drive shows up when I hold down the option key, is there a way to get to disk utility without the DVD install disc? When I connect a FireWire cable to another computer I can see all the disks. I'm wondering if I can run disk utility on the other computer to try and repair??
Click to expand...

yeah that will work fine. just run it from another comp. with your mac pro as target. dont forget permissions.
 
You mentioned you are at work. Why not ask the IT department for an XP install CD and just see if the machine will boot to it. Nevermind I see the machine does see all drives. It is in need of Disk repair util.
 
waremaster said:
You mentioned you are at work. Why not ask the IT department for an XP install CD and just see if the machine will boot to it.
Click to expand...

lol ... I work at a place that's strictly Mac and we didn't upgrade to Leopard yet. I brought the machine to show off the power, and I can't haha. That and the IT department would be me. lol And there is only like 6 people that work here. lol

The Windows side of my machine works fine. It's the Mac OS that is not working. :-(
 
Try booting in verbose mode so you can see where it is hanging at, cmd + v when booting. You could also try running fsck in single user mode, cmd + s when booting. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1492

Or boot into safe mode and run diskutil then.

Edit: when booted into safe mode after running diskutil you can also delete extensions.mkext and extensions.kextcache from /System/Library, do not delete the Extensions folder just these two files. You will be asked for your password. This will not hurt anything just on the next boot it will force your computer to rebuild it's driver list for the hardware currently connected.
 
Question... had you disabled Journaling? If you had journaling enabled, fsck won't do anything for you. If you had disabled it, you might need to run fsck.
 
when in target disk mode does everything show up as a disk correctly? meaning is the system folder in the right place and all same with the user folders.

and last thing to try
remove all the harddrive and put in just the mac one and try booting. then move it to a different slot.
 
velocityg4 said:
Try booting in verbose mode so you can see where it is hanging at, cmd + v when booting. You could also try running fsck in single user mode, cmd + s when booting. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1492

Or boot into safe mode and run diskutil then.

Edit: when booted into safe mode after running diskutil you can also delete extensions.mkext and extensions.kextcache from /System/Library, do not delete the Extensions folder just these two files. You will be asked for your password. This will not hurt anything just on the next boot it will force your computer to rebuild it's driver list for the hardware currently connected.
Click to expand...

Hangs up here...

gregory-constantines-mac-pro com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.mDNSResponder[18]): posix_spawnp("usr/sbin/mDNSResponder", ...): No such file or directory


What does that mean?

Edit - Safe mode didn't work either.
 
bokdol said:
when in target disk mode does everything show up as a disk correctly? meaning is the system folder in the right place and all same with the user folders.

and last thing to try
remove all the harddrive and put in just the mac one and try booting. then move it to a different slot.
Click to expand...

Tried all that. Everything is in the right place. Bays all working properly. Man this is frustrating.
 
I feel for you...

the same thing happened to me literally yesterday!!!!

I tried everything, reset PRAM, SMC, took out ram, unplugged every peripheral, did and Apple Hardware test, i booted from Leopard disc and could see all my drives, system profiler reported everything a-ok.....

...so i called applecare (Always my last resort, im fairly capable with macs now)

They were stumped too and suggested to archive and install from the leopard disc, saying that when i last shut it down something must've been overwritten by accident.

So and hour or so later, Archive and Install, and all is fine!

Had to reformat my Time Machine drive as i wouldn't backup the new system!

all i can say is this may be your solution, good luck.
 
does your other computers have leopard?(needs to be intel)

if they do put them into target disk mode and then plug it into your mad pro. then start up your mac pro while holding option and see if the target shows up as a boot disk. then see if you can use that to repair it.

or try to clone that start up drive on to your mac pro. yeah this should only be done in extreme emergency. it might cause more problems.
 
If you google that error there are lots of hits and forum posts. here is one that may work if you can get to the drive.

>>replace IONETWORKINGFAMILY.KEXT

KykcNov 4 2007, 01:34 PM
Thanks, that worked! Now both LAN cards (built-in and PCI) works, but.. Average speed is aproximately 3.5-3.0 kb/s. Wtf? JaS 10.4.8 works perfectly on my hardware..
--

Solved! At Last! I've installed PCGenRTL8139Ethernet-1.2.0 into IONetworkingFamily PlugIns and it did the trick
 
darthraige said:
My new MacPro has been working flawlessly for 4 months. I decide to bring it to work and it won't start up at all. It just hangs on the gray apple screen with the thingy spinning. Any way around this? This is really making me mad. Not sure why it would be doing this. Any suggestions would be great! :(

-Raige
Click to expand...

Where do you work ?
I'm in the area ;)
 
darthraige said:
Hangs up here...

gregory-constantines-mac-pro com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.mDNSResponder[18]): posix_spawnp("usr/sbin/mDNSResponder", ...): No such file or directory


What does that mean?

Edit - Safe mode didn't work either.
Click to expand...

It's unlikely to boot in it's current condition. Damage to your file structure has left a piece of Darwin's library out in the cold. It can't find the file, therefore it hangs.

Restart with the shift key down from the point of boot. This does a number of things including a forced self-diagnostic. It'll eventually get you to the safe-boot screen. Let it run, this often takes a few minutes.

If it won't let you get there you'll need Disk Warrior to rebuild your directory structures. If things have deteriorated beyond a critical point you'll need Data Rescue to scavenge the disk. I doubt that's necessary though.

A quick solution would be to do a restore-install but I don't recommend it because it would do nothing for any other file structure damage.

If you're curious, the file in question is networking esoterica.
 
Yea nothings working here. Still can't get into safe mode. I guess I will just have to archive and install when I get home... If I have all my programs on here, and dont want to install them again, archive and install takes care of that in the end?
 
yes archive install works great. you do not need to reinstall your apps. it merely reinstalls the OS all apps and user dir stay intact. i had to do it a couple months back due to leopard upgrade over tiger not working well. it's fast and should fix any OS file related problem you may have.
 
OddThomas said:
yes archive install works great. you do not need to reinstall your apps. it merely reinstalls the OS all apps and user dir stay intact. i had to do it a couple months back due to leopard upgrade over tiger not working well. it's fast and should fix any OS file related problem you may have.
Click to expand...

But does it put them in a archive folder and stay there or does it eventually put it all back in the current applications folder when its done?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back