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

kingseamus

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 17, 2017
10
1
San Francisco Bay Area
I've got an early 2009 Mac Pro 4,1 that's often booting to a black screen that hangs indefinitely until I manually restart and try to power on again. This seems to happen about 60% of the time when I try to boot up. Tried resetting PRAM and NVRAM but these resets didn't resolve the issue.

Anyone else experienced this issue?

Some other info about my system:
  • Running 10.11.6
  • Flashed GTX 980 Ti from MacVidCards
  • Main drive is a 1TB SSD with a Bootcamp partition for Windows
 

h9826790

macrumors P6
Apr 3, 2014
16,611
8,537
Hong Kong
I've got an early 2009 Mac Pro 4,1 that's often booting to a black screen that hangs indefinitely until I manually restart and try to power on again. This seems to happen about 60% of the time when I try to boot up. Tried resetting PRAM and NVRAM but these resets didn't resolve the issue.

Anyone else experienced this issue?

Some other info about my system:
  • Running 10.11.6
  • Flashed GTX 980 Ti from MacVidCards
  • Main drive is a 1TB SSD with a Bootcamp partition for Windows

Apart from the above list, any other self upgrade?
 

kingseamus

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 17, 2017
10
1
San Francisco Bay Area
When you boot into macOS, does the problem happen?
Have you tried with an alternate video card?
No alternate video card, and the problem pops up when booting into both macOS and Windows (though...perhaps less frequently on Windows?)
[doublepost=1531723451][/doublepost]
If you try selecting the Startup Disk first in SysPref, does that work better?
Unfortunately it doesn't. I'm going to have to be a bit more attentive to this but my perception has been that booting into Windows tends to be more successful (though I will still sometimes get that black screen upon start up in Windows).
[doublepost=1531723709][/doublepost]Every time (booting to macOS, at least) it successfully boots, there will be a inevitable period of about 10-30 seconds or so of black screen followed by a series of command prompt lines of white text that begin to fill the screen.

Though this happens quickly and is a bit difficult to capture, I'll try to get footage of these lines via so I can examine what they say.
 
  • Like
Reactions: MIKX

MIKX

macrumors 68000
Dec 16, 2004
1,815
690
Japan
No alternate video card, and the problem pops up when booting into both macOS and Windows (though...perhaps less frequently on Windows?)
[doublepost=1531723451][/doublepost]
Every time (booting to macOS, at least) it successfully boots, there will be a inevitable period of about 10-30 seconds or so of black screen followed by a series of command prompt lines of white text that begin to fill the screen.

Though this happens quickly and is a bit difficult to capture, I'll try to get footage of these lines via so I can examine what they say.
I have seen a few other posts about these " flashing, pixilated " white lines appearing towards the bottom right of the monitor at boot up . .. . . I hope it's not malicious. I've seen it too in older installs, not happening in my current fresh installs of Sierra or High Sierra. A new thread devoted to this might yield some info. Please do make a new thread if tyou can get some pics of the effect.
 

kingseamus

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 17, 2017
10
1
San Francisco Bay Area
I have seen a few other posts about these " flashing, pixilated " white lines appearing towards the bottom right of the monitor at boot up . .. . . I hope it's not malicious. I've seen it too in older installs, not happening in my current fresh installs of Sierra or High Sierra. A new thread devoted to this might yield some info. Please do make a new thread if tyou can get some pics of the effect.

Fortunately I don't think it's anything malicious. They're white lines on a black screen that look like command lines, for lack of a better term--the kinds of white lines that one would see when using an old operating system. A Google search I just did suggests that this is called "verbose mode."

I'm not sure if the Mac Pro often failing to boot is being caused by the graphics card not being recognized upon start up, since it's a flashed graphics card, or if it has something to do with the Windows partition on my main drive. Could be something else entirely...wish I knew!
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.