problems booting mac pro tower

[darrell]

Hi all. I have an Early 2008 Mac Pro tower, and have 2 problems that may or may not be unrelated.

I’ve learned to live with the first one, but would like to solve it if possible. The tower had 2 SATA drives and was fine when I bought it, and I then installed a 500GB SSD. Still no problems. I then installed a 1TB drive. Now, more often than not, when I start it up, the Mac chimes and the little light on the front comes on, but then starts flashing and the startup won’t go any further. I then push and hold the button until the machine quits, and then try again. Sometimes it boots, sometimes I have to do 3 or 4 tries until it goes. I’ve tried things like turning the monitor on and off and disconnecting my 896 and periferals, but still no go. This leads me to the idea that there may be some problem with the Mac booting the larger SSD.....Is there a specific order that these drives should be installed in the computer’s HD slots? I use a SATA drive for the boot drive, and the 2 SSD drives are for sample storage only.

The other problem started yesterday. I go through the startup procedure I described above, the white screen with the Apple logo comes up, and the little segmented circular spinning “working” logo does it’s thing, and then the screen remains white and nothing else happens. The only irregular thing I did before trying to start the computer up this time was that I had both my iphone and ipod plugged into the front panel USB ports, and an external firewire drive, also plugged into the front of the mac. The FW drive was running when I turned the mac on.

Any ideas before I take the thing to a Mac person?

Thanks!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

10.6.8... ok.

I'd start up holding the option key and see what comes up as a boot disk and when. Certainly repair permissions and run disk repair on all disks. Reset the PRAM.

Other than that, I'd also check on how much space is available on the disks. If it's more than 75% or so, I'd start thinking about replacing that disk(s) with a larger one(s).

Also, you can try setting up a new user and booting into that user to see if it's a conflict with anything you might have in your current account (3rd party conflicts is specifically what I'd be looking for by doing that).

[mikehalloran]

A couple of other things. After a successful boot, did you ever go into System Preferences/Startup Disk and select the correct drive? If not, do so. If you ever do an Option-Boot, this is even more important. When you just have one drive with the OS, this isn't necessary but it will shave a few seconds off of normal start up.

If you have done this, it could be as simple as your system not remembering the settings. Get a CR2032 battery and replace the NV RAM (PRAM on a PPC) memory battery. If the OE is in there, it will say BR2032. A CR2032 will be just fine. There are YouTube videos that show you exactly where it is and how to change without breaking the holder — there's a trick.

[darrell]

Thanks, guys, but nothing so far seems to work. I tried Option/boot, and nothing, then I realized I could find even some more ideas on the web, so did the 4-key PRAM/boot, but nothing.

I can't look at any prefs or utilities, because all that happens is the screen goes what after the grey apple logo page. The sign-in page deosn't even come up.

Thanks again,
Darrell

[cuttime]

I seem to recall that the flashing light indicates faulty/inadequate RAM. If you can boot up I'd run a RAM checker like Rember or run the Apple Hardware test. I'd then start swapping out RAM sticks if you have some spare ones on hand.

[darrell]

Thanks all for the considered replies. Still searching..........

[HCMarkus]

Disconnect all USB devices and try again.

If USB devices are pulling too much power (like when a hub power supply goes bad) your Mac won't boot, or will sit on the white screen for a really long time.

Remedy: New Powered USB Hub.

[wylie1]

These can also be symptoms of a failing hard drive.
Before you do anything else make sure you get a full backup once the kernel panics start it may be to late.