Mac Pro Help

[Spinal]

I have an oldish Mac Pro (2008 or 2009), and it's been pretty good so far. A full complement of 8 sticks of ram, 4x3TB HDDs and two processors. All in, a nice machine.

The hard drive died last week, and today I changed that.

Now it wont power up, all I get is a relay click from the PSU when pressing the power button (followed by another click after 10seconds or so).

No lights, no fans.

I'm guessing the PSU is dead as well (maybe my fault as I vacuumed out as much dust as I could in the case and may have touched something.)

I can get a replacement PSU for £150 or so, second hand, which is a little steep considering I don't even know if that's the issue. I could buy another computer and transfer the HDDs over, but can't transfer the ram unless it's another mac pro, so that would be a waste as macs of that generation seem to sell for £400 on ebay.

Any ideas? Struggling to decide what to do...

M.

 

[brucemillar]

Try powering it up without the HD installed to see if it is the HD that is causing your issue?

 

[Spinal]

Had tried that - no change.

It gets worse... or more complex...

Unplugged everything, removed all HDD. Dusted everything and reseating everything I had previously touched.

Let it rest while I grabbed some food and consoled myself.

Now it starts up, but none of the normal boot keys (e.g. S, C or option) work. I tried resetting the nvRAM, but that didn't do anything. All I get is the question mark-on-a-folder.

Thinking it may be the keyboard, I grabbed a second keyboard (an apple one this time) and tried again... nada.

I'm trying to boot off a USB stick that should have the OSX installer on it, and been blessed (bought on ebay as I can't find my installer disks and don't have another osx computer to hand).

So I'm thinking maybe the USB stick is at fault now?

 

[Spinal]

and after some more fiddling, got my hands on a macbook running osx 10.7... the USB stick boots on that, and has a flashing LED when being read.

On the mac pro, if I hold alt/option instead of the question-mark-folder, I just get a grey screen with a mouse pointer (that I can move). No option to choose the OSX yosemite USB drive...

Hummm......

 

[219]

The folder with the question mark is usually that it can't see the startup volume .

Since you have the MacBook , can you connect the two with a Firewire cable and try starting the Mac Pro in target mode then see if the macBook sees the system volume on the mac Pro as an external drive ?

That would prove whether your HDD in the mac Pro is working and that the SATA bus is OK .

If you had an old IDE HDD lying around , you could pop that into one of the Mac Pro optical bays and see if that one runs .

Can you hear the SATA drives spinning up ? I'm wondering if the power supply to the SATA drives is working ?

I have a similar vintage Mac Pro 8 core and one of my sticks of RAM died over the holidays , leaving me only 2 Gb , so I feel your pain .

They are still good machines .

Don't know if the power supplies will be the same across the range , but I keep seeing cheap ones on Gumtree locally , usually bare machines stripped of extras for £100 or so ...

 

[Spinal]

Funny you mentioned target mode - I had the same idea, but couldn't find a firewire cable.

While looking for the fw cable, I found an old portable HDD that I had scribbled "10.8 bootable" on, with a FW800 cable.

That's now booted and installing osx to the 3tb drive. Based on some reading online, the yosemite installer seems to want to start only on machines that have osx already installed... which seems a bit... stupid, so I doubt it's true.

Anyhow, should be running again soon!

(there's a lot of ram for these on ebay )

M.

 

[Spinal]

The saga isn't over... the image on that HDD was a 10.6 beta (and not 10.8 as scribbled on it) that I had for work years ago. Doh. Can't update it with any production 10.6 packages, including the 10.6.8 that I need to install before being able to install 10.10. Grumble.

Now looking for a 10.7 or 10.8 installer.

M.

 

[219]

Bummer , can you copy the 10.7 system folder off the MacBook onto the external drive . Might get you up and running ?

I'd been watching the Bookyard for RAM but they haven't had used 8 gig kits for a while , plan is to max out to 32 Gig when funds allow , put SSD system drive in one of the optical bays and use the four other slots for a raid array for video editing and keep everything else on external network drives - bought the machine last summer with 6 gig but one 2 gig stick went down .

 

[Spinal]

Aren't the optical bays PATA? Wouldn't that impact the effectiveness of a SSD?

Finally got it sorted late last night. Solution was...

Install 10.6.b
Access NAS and find 10.7 installer. Image this onto a spare HDD, then install on computer
Download 10.10 installer, image this onto the HDD, then install on computer (I wanted to do a clean install, not an upgrade).

Turns out, the 10.10 installer doesn't seem to like a clean/blank hard drive. It seem that it wants to see a 10.6.8 or newer OS before it will even boot to the installer.

Part of me wants to try with another clean drive to verify... but I'm a bit tired and just glad it's running again.

The downside is I can't find my photoshop discs... I'm hoping that the cloud backup solution I had set up a while ago copied that.

M.

 

[219]

Aren't the optical bays PATA? Wouldn't that impact the effectiveness of a SSD?

Finally got it sorted late last night. Solution was...

Install 10.6.b
Access NAS and find 10.7 installer. Image this onto a spare HDD, then install on computer
Download 10.10 installer, image this onto the HDD, then install on computer (I wanted to do a clean install, not an upgrade).

Turns out, the 10.10 installer doesn't seem to like a clean/blank hard drive. It seem that it wants to see a 10.6.8 or newer OS before it will even boot to the installer.

Part of me wants to try with another clean drive to verify... but I'm a bit tired and just glad it's running again.

The downside is I can't find my photoshop discs... I'm hoping that the cloud backup solution I had set up a while ago copied that.

M.

The optical bays are PATA , but there are two SATA ports on the motherboard next to them ( not a lot of people know this ) which allow SATA devices to be fitted

My plans for the machine include replacing the DVD writer with a Blu Ray writer ( try finding an IDE one ) as well as a SSD in the other bay , which then leaves all four internal drive bays for storage

I fitted a SSD in my MacBook Pro , which now starts up in about 10 sec , so know how much of a difference it makes .

First priority is more RAM , annoyingly I have lots of 667 MHz RAM for the older Mac Pros but none of the 800 MHz RAM this machine needs . I've seen RAM advertised cheaply on eBay too but a bit nervous about buying from unknown sellers , whereas I'be dealt with the Bookyard for years and have come to trust them , even if they are more expensive .

Re the OS , I've stopped at Mavericks for now , I had tried Yosemite but found my Final Cut Pro 7 wouldnt run under it ( I don't like FCPX ) , also I didn't like the look of the iOS8 style icons . Fortunately I had done a Time Machine backup before the install so I just reverted .

I've been using the Adobe CC photography package for about £8/ month which gives me Photoshop & LR with always the latest Camera Raw and other updates on both my machines , and I still have a full install of CS4 on my old G5 .

 

[219]

Incidentally , after buying my 8 core machine last year for £400 ( 8x 2.8GHz , 500 Gb system drive , 6Gb RAM - to which I added two 2 Tb internal drives as a RAID array for video editing , everything else external ) , I've since noticed that some 12 core machines are now coming onto the market for not a lot more . The nice thing about the 12 core machines is the faster bus speed and that they support up to 128 Gb of RAM . I'm just wondering if they are reliable or not ?