2009 Mac Pro just died. Need advice.

[mikehalloran]

I’m wondering if the disk went bad and that was creating all this trouble. Now that it’s ejected, I’ll see if the problem is gone. Won’t know till tomorrow.

Quite possible.

When a mechanical (spinner, HHD) drive goes bad, the best you can hope for is to get it working long enough to pull the data off before sending it to recycling. You do that by running Disk Utility on it, sometimes over and over, till it either seizes or shows green at the end. Any such "repair" is temporary at best and false hope in most cases. I have never repaired an HHD and had it not fail soon after — not once.

If you already have a backup, Time Machine etc. just remove the drive and send to recycling.

Still replace that battery.

[NealF]

Will do.

Thanks for the advice. I’m hoping it’s just the drive but I’ll find out for sure tomorrow.

[Don T]

IIRC, there are issues with sleep and MOTU.

[HCMarkus]

My studio Mac is not allowed to sleep. I shut down every night. Booting with SSD takes a whole 20 seconds, so not a big (or even small) deal.

[mikehalloran]

My studio Mac is not allowed to sleep. I shut down every night. Booting with SSD takes a whole 20 seconds, so not a big (or even small) deal.

Also disable App Nap globally. It serves no purpose except to conserve battery life in portables. DP doesn’t like it. Many plugs don’t play well with it as do other apps ad older versions of Office.

http://osxdaily.com/2014/05/13/disable- ... -mac-os-x/

[NealF]

The way I use the computer is a couple of hours, go away for an hour or two, a couple more. Break for an hour. Etc.

That's why I always put it to sleep. Then I'd let it sleep over night. Had no problems for almost a decade. But you guys think, even though I'm off and on so much, that I should just let it run and shut it down only over night or for longer periods?

I'm assuming I should let the screen go to sleep to avoid burn in.

BTW, started up okay this morning. Got the disk can't be read message again. I guess on startup it's still seeing the bad drive. But so far, so good. I'll be changing the battery soon.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

The rationale behind not shutting down (or one main one I've always heard) is this: when does a lightbulb usually blow out? When you turn it on. So the "logic" that follows is: if you don't turn your computer on, you won't blow it out. WRONG! They don't use delicate tungsten filaments in computers. Heck, they don't even use them in modern light bulbs any more.

And theory I've heard is 'you want to keep the chips warm because sending a current thru a cold chip will burn it out. WRONG! if that were the case, every new machine wouldn't get past the first startup.

There is no actual reason to keep a machine on when not in use for a few hours. As for sleeping, I've consistently had wake up issues with sleep mode on pretty much every machine I've had. I do turn off my monitors if I'm going to be away from the machine for maybe an hour or two. The 30" Cinema Display gets warm fast. I might even eject an external drive or 2 (or 5). But I'll keep the machine "on."

[mikehalloran]

The big problem with waking up from sleep is having all your external devices and drives wake up properly. FireWire especially but usb, too now and then. SSDs use so little current and generate little heat so there’s no noticeable energy savings — certainly not enough to offset the inconvenience.

I let my monitors sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity — no problem there and a definite energy savings.

RAM doesn’t clear completely except on a reboot. In addition, so many apps, plugins and web sites cause memory leaks that rebooting once a day is not just a good idea. I consider it imperative for maintaining smooth operation of my system.

[NealF]

All excellent advice.

I've had my computer on all day now. Just sleep the screen when I'm not using it. So far all is well.
But, of course, I'll have to see what happens when I reboot next.

I'll be doing the battery thing as soon as I can. But I think you guys might have saved me a lot of heartache (and money.)

[HCMarkus]

If you find you need more Horsepower, you can update your 4,1 firmware to 5,1 and install a hex CPU (X5680 or 90 or W3680 or 90) to just about double your CPU resources. Cost is about $75 for a used X5680 these days. Lots of folks 'round here have done this, including me.

This thread has a lot of info:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=58848

[NealF]

Yes! I'll be doing that soon.
Thanks for the info.

[Padank]

Well, I thought I had it working, but still, when it sleeps for a while it'll wake up with a black screen.

Why is it going to sleep? Last I checked enabling sleep can mess up a lot of things.

I NEVER sleep my machine. NEV-ER!

Ditto- Everything except monitors run 24/7/365. Dont want to upset the ecosystem!
SP

[NealF]

So I opted for a better used Mac Pro. I got a 2010 with 32 gigs of ram and a 1 TB hard drive.
I put all my old drives back in the "new" computer. All was well for a while.

Then the same problem hit. 3/4 of the time I start up, the screen stays white. Now, however, I keep getting the startup screen as if I just bought a new computer. Apparently it's not seeing the main drive.

Sometimes it does, sometime it doesn't. I noticed on the startup screen I had the option of choosing the startup drive. My main drive was the only one showing and I chose that. Then it started up fine.

So my question now is, what could be causing the computer to not recognize the startup drive?

BTW, I ran Disk Utility on all my drives and they all passed.

[mikehalloran]

BTW, I ran Disk Utility on all my drives and they all passed.

So did these. They were all bad and replacing them fixed the problem in each case. I have more than these three.







Replace any suspect drives. If you were able to fix one in Disk Utility, it will fail again — minutes? hours? days? That's the only thing you don't know. That it will fail again is absolutely certain.

Replace them with larger SSDs.

[NealF]

So Disk Utility isn't more than a band aid.

Do you think it could be the main drive (ssd) that could be causing the computer to not see it as a startup? Sometimes it works fine.