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Cody Craddock

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 5, 2020
16
2
Hey everyone,

I am a new member here with an issue that I hope you all can shed some light on. I have a 2008 mac Pro running Mac OS 10.11.6 El Capitan. Recently I decided to buy a second hard drive and use it internally. I purchased a 3.5 inch Hard Drive (used; with a clean wipe) with 2 TB of storage. I attached this drive to the sled and slid it into the drive bay. Of course, the Mac was first shut down and the power cord was disconnected. With the second drive in bay #2 the machine would not boot. My next action was to shut the Mac down and hold the option key. When I did this a white screen showed up and my mouse cursor was up, however, no disk were available to boot into.

Confused, I decided to take out the second disk and try to boot up. After this second disk was out the machine, it booted perfectly fine into El Capitan. Called Apple and listened to a tech punch keys for 10 minutes before telling me he doesn't know what is going on.
 

MacDann

macrumors 6502a
Sounds like something is wrong (physically) with the second disk and it's messing with the hard drive controller.

Look closely at the SATA connectors on the drive and make sure they're not damaged.

Did you try it in one of the other drive bays? At least that would confirm it's the drive causing the problem if it still refuses to boot no matter which bay the drive is in.

If you have an external USB enclosure you could drop it into and plug it into the cMP to see if it's recognized that would also give you some insight into the drive's condition and formatting.

MacDann
 
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Cody Craddock

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 5, 2020
16
2
So, turns out I was sent a SAS drive and not a SATA drive. I made sure to check this, but the seller did not when shipping my item.
 
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