09 Mac Pro Stuck in Boot Loop (Grey Screen)

[scottrichardson]

Hi all,

My 2009 Mac Pro 8-Core 2.93Ghz has been acting a little strange the past few weeks.

Every 2nd boot, it will get stuck in a loop at the grey screen. The rotating/loading graphic appears, then the screen blinks as if it is going to load the desktop, but then reloads the loading graphic. The only fix is to force shut down and try another boot up.

The only things that I have changed recently are swapping 16GB OWC RAM for 32GB OWC RAM, and adding a Caldigit 2 port USB3 PCI Card - all working fine as far as I can tell.

I have an OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 3G 240GB as my boot drive, TWO OCZ Vertex 2 120GB SSDs in RAID 0 as my work/files drive, and a 2TB WD Black disk for media.

Running 10.8.2, Radeon 4870 and an unused GeForce 120GT, USB3 Seagate for Timemachine.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Scottie

 

[Loa]

Hello,

One at a time, try switching your RAM back to what it was, and removing the card. If the symptom disappears, at least you'll know where to look for conflicts.

Loa

 

[minifridge1138]

That's the best way to figure out what's happening.

Undo all of your changes. See if things are normal.
Make 1 change. See if things are normal.
etc... until you find the cause of your problems.

 

[Dr. Stealth]

Hardware Issue...

It's most likely NOT the ram. PCI cards can and will conflict and you get the startup issues. Make sure you have the latest firmware and drivers for your cards. Drivers especially if they are not already built onto the OS.

I had the looping boot issue just last week while messing with a Velocity Solo X2 card. I was trying to run Bootcamp Win 7 x64 and it was a complete no-go.

 

[VA24]

I have had similar issues on my Mac Pro (2008) for the past couple months. Seems to be caused at times by a photo card reader and other times when it wakes up from sleep overnight or over the weekend.

I was able to take care of the issue by deleting the Finder plist on 3 or 4 occasions, but yesterday that didn't work and now things have devolved into a situation where I can't get past the grey screen with the Apple logo and spinning gear.

I'm approaching it as if there is a hard drive issue and am trying a new drive out to see if that changes things, but now I'm having issues formatting the new drive. If you haven't tried the plist fix though, I'd recommend giving that a shot.