Help please: Brand new 2.8 w/ 8800 having problems...

[OMGWTFBBQ]

I just got my new mac pro today. It's a 2.8 Octo w/ an 8800 2gigs of ram and the 500gb WD that came with it. Everything was running great, I was surfing on the internet, setting up iphoto, copying over my music etc, when all of the sudden the music I was listening to stopped playing and I got a beach-ball. I don't know what happened--my finder stopped responding, I tried force quitting all my applications--but i couldn't regain control of the system. After waiting for a bit, I did a hard reset. My computer took a long five minutes to load, it was stuck booting on a blue screen no background, no nothing. Once it was finally booted I did another reboot to see if it was a one time thing...but it wasn't. Same problem as the first boot. I did the apple diagnostic test with the install dvd, and it took a whopping 13 minutes and 11 seconds (is that long?) it should only take 3 minutes right? The test came back saying there were no problems. I accidentally hit the start button again, and now it won't let me stop the test. ARgh, what's wrong with my new baby?!!!

Update: first it freezes on the white screen before the apple, then it hangs on the grey apple with the white screen then it hangs on the light blue screen, and then it loads....

 

[deathshrub]

I added 8GB of after market RAM (total: 12GB) and the Apple hardware test (non-extended) took over an hour on my computer.

If the same exact thing happened to me, I would boot from the OS X install DVD and reinstall OS X. If you call Apple, this is also what they will likely advise you to do. You may want to do an archive and install if you have files that you haven't backed up yet. (IE: photos, songs, etc.) This will preserve all of your info in a folder on the root directory of your drive called "Previous System" if I'm not mistaken.

Report back on if this works or not.

 

[snagitseven]

I just got my new mac pro today. It's a 2.8 Octo w/ an 8800 2gigs of ram and the 500gb WD that came with it. Everything was running great, I was surfing on the internet, setting up iphoto, copying over my music etc, when all of the sudden the music I was listening to stopped playing and I got a beach-ball. I don't know what happened--my finder stopped responding, I tried force quitting all my applications--but i couldn't regain control of the system. After waiting for a bit, I did a hard reset. My computer took a long five minutes to load, it was stuck booting on a blue screen no background, no nothing. Once it was finally booted I did another reboot to see if it was a one time thing...but it wasn't. Same problem as the first boot. I did the apple diagnostic test with the install dvd, and it took a whopping 13 minutes and 11 seconds (is that long?) it should only take 3 minutes right? The test came back saying there were no problems. I accidentally hit the start button again, and now it won't let me stop the test. ARgh, what's wrong with my new baby?!!!

Update: first it freezes on the white screen before the apple, then it hangs on the grey apple with the white screen then it hangs on the light blue screen, and then it loads....

What computer and system did you transfer from and how did you do it - Migration Assistant or did you start from scratch and transfer manually? If you had a non-Intel Mac running 10.4.x, it's a good idea to avoid Migration Assist. and do it manually, step by step. I did it that way and no probs.
Take the advice and do a clean install of 10.5.1, update to 10.5.2 and then start bringing in your apps and data one by one. Use Time Machine with manual backups frequently so if something breaks, you can go back in time to before it happened.

Google for how to bring iTunes over as well as the other Apple apps data. Reload all comples software, ie. Office, CS3 (CS2 is risky on Leopard), etc. Look for 10.5 updates for software before you bring it over. Take your time and test each addition before adding more. Keep an eye on your at your Console Logs as you go - can give you loads of info if a problem develops. A pain in the butt for sure, but well worth the trouble.

If you still have probs after all that, and you're sure it's not some stubborn app or it's files brought over, then it's time to consider a hardware failure.
Could happen but software more likely the cause. Leopard and Intel is a pretty big change from non-Intel 10.4. (assuming that's what you are doing).

 

[OMGWTFBBQ]

Thanks a bunch for your quick replies!

I will do as you both have instructed, I really hope this is a software problem.

 

[ngpeter]

I had a similar problem, but with an additional drive in bay 4. It would be really slow writing (x50 slower) to the hard drive. It worked fine in bay 1, 2 and 3.

I would try moving your hard drive to another bay to see if this is the problem. Apple agreed to send me a replacement mac pro, since it was only 2 weeks old.

I would suggest you test all your bay drives using your boot drive as it can boot from any bay.

 

[OMGWTFBBQ]

I think the problem turned out to be that I had an external firewire drive hooked up to both my mac pro via 800 and to my ibook via 400, and I think that is what was tripping up my computer. D'oh!

But I think I will try moving around my hard drive to make sure everything is working well. Thanks again!

 

[crm114]

i had a similar problem when i had a firewire drive hooked up to my MP 8800 and a PC laptop at the same time - inadvertantly left the pc hooked up. it would go to a grey screen and just hang while restarting - after i unplugged the firewire it all started up fine.