I installed Lion the day it was released on my late '06 MacPro (6GB RAM, nVidia 8800gt). Everything worked fine for a week then it started freezing. I was able to move the mouse but couldn't click on anything. After a hard shutdown I could restart and work for an hour or two before another freeze. The following day it started freezing while booting. I'll get to the apple and spinning gear and then it will just freeze and go to a white screen. If I wait the white screen will go to white on the top half and black on the bottom half with some jumping and flashing across the middle.
I assumed it was an issue with the driver for the nVidia 8800gt and Lion and decided to call Apple. With tech support I booted into safe-mode to make sure it wasn't a hard drive issue and reset the p-ram. The tech set up a genius bar appointment thinking they would be better able to help me in person. On my own before the appointment I repaired the disk permissions, booted with peripherals disconnected, and tested the memory but with no luck.
I went to my appointment today and it wasn't much help at all. I was hoping they would have another graphics card we could test out, but they didn't. They wanted to keep my computer to run hardware tests but I didn't really want to have to drive the 150 mile round trip to pick it up. I asked if we could boot into safe-mode and check the boot logs. The "genius" didn't notice anything, but I noticed a kernel error at the end of each unsuccessful boot. There were actually three of them. They were all 'NVDA- channel timeout'. One was 'OpenGL', one was 'video', and one was 'compute'.
So, now I could reinstall Snow Leopard, get a new video card (I guess the ATI HD5770 would be my main option on this computer), or wait for Apple/nVidia to release a new driver.
I have read about Lion freezing but not while booting. Does anyone have any other suggestions for me or is anyone else experiencing this issue?
I assumed it was an issue with the driver for the nVidia 8800gt and Lion and decided to call Apple. With tech support I booted into safe-mode to make sure it wasn't a hard drive issue and reset the p-ram. The tech set up a genius bar appointment thinking they would be better able to help me in person. On my own before the appointment I repaired the disk permissions, booted with peripherals disconnected, and tested the memory but with no luck.
I went to my appointment today and it wasn't much help at all. I was hoping they would have another graphics card we could test out, but they didn't. They wanted to keep my computer to run hardware tests but I didn't really want to have to drive the 150 mile round trip to pick it up. I asked if we could boot into safe-mode and check the boot logs. The "genius" didn't notice anything, but I noticed a kernel error at the end of each unsuccessful boot. There were actually three of them. They were all 'NVDA- channel timeout'. One was 'OpenGL', one was 'video', and one was 'compute'.
So, now I could reinstall Snow Leopard, get a new video card (I guess the ATI HD5770 would be my main option on this computer), or wait for Apple/nVidia to release a new driver.
I have read about Lion freezing but not while booting. Does anyone have any other suggestions for me or is anyone else experiencing this issue?