MOTUnation.com

My Mac Pro has begun to beachball endlessly. Booting into safe mode worked for awhile but it eventually got to the point that the Mac would simply power off halfway through the boot up sequence. I've been wrestling this damn thing for 2 months now.

I took it to a Genius Bar appointment and the diagnosis was "failed system disk". I have this thing running all SSD's mounted on high bandwidth PCIe cards except for one spinner with a copy of Mavricks in bay 1 as an emergency boot volume. Given my somewhat unconventional set of upgrades I told them to leave it and I'd pick it up. I asked if they tried booting it from the spinner in bay 1 and they said they didn't open the case. Just that their little diagnostic tool said the main system drive was damaged and hanging on reads. So I picked it up.

I've removed all the PCIe cards except for video and successfully booted it off the old spinner. Seems OK. Plugged in the System SSD to one of the front bay connectors and ran disk utility on it - it passed.

However...when I try to boot from the System SSD it boots and then beachballs forever. Pull it and I can boot again. I bought a new SSD. Plugged it in to the front bay connector and managed to format it. However, I cannot get the App Store to load it with Sierra. It hangs. I tried putting the new SSD onto the PCIe interface card and plugging that in. Hangs.

Beginning to suspect RAM or system board. Open to ideas. I swear I spend more time maintaining machines and updating software than making music anymore.

Beginning to suspect RAM or system board.

Could be but I wouldn't bet the farm on it.

How long has it been since you changed the NV RAM battery? If over 4 years, that's where I would start. A bad battery is far worse than no battery. Go ahead and use a common CR2032. The OE BR2032 is required for high heat Macs like the 2011-on iMac and 2013-on Mac Pro.

If the battery doesn't do it, I would partition that spinner and install Sierra onto it from the App Store.

Disk Utility is fairly useless on SSDs but can do minor cleanup like update the Boot utilities and the like. If you are not running Sierra on your SSDs, this must be done before it will install.

In Sierra, DU only runs well from the Repair Partition. Option-Boot to your spinner and select the OS 10.12.5 Repair Partition from the menu. Run it on the formatted partition first, then the whole drive.

mikehalloran wrote:

Beginning to suspect RAM or system board.

How long has it been since you changed the NV RAM battery?

Like, never. I guess I'll give that a go tomorrow. Thanks.

aaaand nope, new battery, same problem. Actually it has gotten worse - hangs on boot with everything.

Starting to suspect main board.

Long time Mr. Sixer.

Is your cMP a 4,1>5,1 upgrade or 5,1 stock?

If 4,1>5,1, I have my spare hex 4,1>5,1 easily accessible. We could try your CPU tray in it if you have any concerns about any component there (CPU, RAM, daughterboard, Northbridge, etc.).

Hey Mark, Its been a very crazy year.

I'm moving at the end of the month because the landlord wants to sell - got a new house about 3 miles away for only 20% more money. Plus my daughter moved in with me last summer after a crazy legal battle with my ex so I've had very little time to do anything musical. I just fired this machine up after hardly using it at all for most of the past year and I'm finding it is pretty much toast.

After a couple weeks of trial and error and stripping it down to bare essentials I have it booting again with a new Western Digital SSD that I managed to format with Sierra from my laptop using a USB->SATA adaptor. So it doesn't appear to be main board or RAM.

However, attempts to use disk first aid on the old system ssd have failed. Disk first aid says it is actually OK, but when I try to read the files it hangs forever. So I'm looking at reinstalling and reauthorizing all the software from scratch.

I had two more 1TB SanDisk SSD's for samples and projects that I installed when I built this thing. I thought they were OK but trying to clone them using CCC results in reports of errors. So that's 3 1T SanDisk SSD's failing in less than two years and pretty much all my files gone. The backups aren't looking good either.

Pretty disheartened. At the moment I feel like just putting all the gear on eBay and walking away.

A bad stick of RAM will cause cloning errors. It's one of the classic symptoms.

Hey Mike,

Yeah, I thought maybe but I've moved them to another computer and they're still failing. Also, its the same files each time. Its funny how SSD's fail - very gradual - just certain files begin to become unreadable. It shows most when trying to carbon copy clone them to another device - they actually end up unmounted during the process.

Fortunately SanDisk's are warrantied for ten years, I've got 8 left on them so it seems I just need to hit up their website for RMA numbers and send them back. Replacements take 1-2 weeks.

Its the thought of reinstalling every single thing that seems most painful. I did manage to get 95% of the contents off my projects drive - I lost a couple audio files in a few projects. Lets hope those were out takes.