Resolved Mac Pro dead?

[O.N.Y.X]

I was working in Logic Pro today and all of a sudden I got the spinning beach ball which is extremely rare. I closed Logic, tried to relaunch but only got the jumping Logic icon.

Next I tried a reboot (of El Cap, latest update) from my SM512 blade. This usually takes 15-20 seconds. But right after completing the progress bar the Mac just shows a white screen and hangs indefinitely.

I changed the boot drive back to the built in spinning 1 GB WD which still has an outdated version of Mavericks, with exactly the same result. The Mac just hangs at a white screen. Same when attempting a boot to save mode.

Resetting the NVRAM seemed to work (judging from the sound) but again only brings the Mac to a white screen.

Diagnostics doesn't seem to diagnose anything, the Mac just hangs at a white screen with the mouse pointer shown but no reaction to movements on my magic mouse.

Entering recovery mode works incl. magic mouse and internet access, and I'm currently installing El Cap over the internet onto the original boot drive.

Is there anything else I can try/do? It's the Mac Pro in my sig that has been working like a charm since '12 when bought refurbished from Apple. Incredibly solid/stable system until now

I'm pretty frustrated, this is my production Mac Pro, there is no "junk" on this machine, only Logic Pro and tons of sample libraries.

 

[flyinmac]

If it boots into recovery mode, then the hardware is still working.

I'd guess that perhaps your boot volumes / partitions, or pointers towards those other boot locations might be corrupted somehow.

 

[orph]

try to unplug then re plug in after 1 min to reset the power thing
then try safe booting (if it's a bad driver or something it will safe boot)
if no luck go back to recovery mode and try using disc utility to check the boot drive, see what it says.


you can try installing a new copy of osx on to something from recovery mode, once you can boot from something you can start troubleshooting.
I use usb sticks as backup bootble media for troubleshooting (needs to be 8GB or bigger) even an SD card in an SD card reader can be used.
or if you have a spare drive to install osx on to that will work to.

if you can boot on to an external USB drive or new internal drive/partition then you can start backing up data etc and see if you can find the problem

may be something simple like bad ram or lose pci slot or corrupted partition or a background app

 

[ITguy2016]

I'd recommend starting with the basics such as removing any peripherals / hard disks which are unnecessary, falling back to the minimum amount of RAM, etc. If you remove RAM and the problem persists then I would swap out the RAM for that you've removed. Do you have an alternate video card? If the system can boot into Recovery Mode then perhaps it's a problem with the video card which appears when the drivers load?

 

[orph]

it's worth pulling all pci cards apart from the GPU and seeing if you can boot

 

[O.N.Y.X]

Thanks for the replies guys. After installing El Cap to the stock boot drive I was able to boot the Mac, so I'm obviously not dealing with the worst case scenario here. However, booting from the SM512 is a no go. Something must have messed up system files on both drives (how the hell is this possible?!?). Reinstalling El Cap on the SM512 as I write this.

@orph: Unplug/replug didn't help either, as didn't "First Aid"-ing the SM512. A USB stick as backup bootable drive is a great idea.

All peripherals are unplugged.

What just came to mind... I set up a new user account before and changed a few read/write permissions using my admin rights. I didn't change any files though. Could I possibly have screwed up something this way?

 

[ITguy2016]

Thanks for the replies guys. After installing El Cap to the stock boot drive I was able to boot the Mac, so I'm obviously not dealing with the worst case scenario here. However, booting from the SM512 is a no go. Something must have messed up system files on both drives (how the hell is this possible?!?). Reinstalling El Cap on the SM512 as I write this.

@orph: Unplug/replug didn't help either, as didn't "First Aid"-ing the SM512. A USB stick as backup bootable drive is a great idea.

All peripherals are unplugged.

What just came to mind... I set up a new user account before and changed a few read/write permissions using my admin rights. I didn't change any files though. Could I possibly have screwed up something this way?

Were both drives present in the system when the failure occurred? Changing file permissions could be an explanation depending on what files were changed and the way the permissions were changed. Can you expand upon which files and what changes?

 

[O.N.Y.X]

Were both drives present in the system when the failure occurred?

yes

I shared certain permissions from my admin account with my user account because I always had to type my admin password for write access. I also applied access to enclosed items on the SM951 (=SM512, I keep confusing these numbers LOL); I didn't do anything on the stock boot drive though.

OK reinstalling El Cap on the SM951 brought my Mac back to where it was before. What a pain!

 

[Flint Ironstag]

1, Make sure you have good backups.

2, now's the time for Disk Warrior.

 

[O.N.Y.X]

Yeah. I'm relieved, scared and upset now!

Thanks for all the help everybody!

 

[orph]

good to hear that it's fixable. hope your data is recoverable.

i keep my boot drives small and all valuable data not on my OS partition for safety and to stop permission problems.
but i also share my data drives over multiple boot osx partitions.