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External USB/FW drives kills Mac Pro

Cave Man

Cave Man

macrumors 604
Original poster
Feb 12, 2007
7,158
350
Neander Valley, Germany; just outside Duesseldorf
I have a 2010 Mac Pro 12 core, 10.9.4 and a Fusion drive (120GB/2TB), 27" ACD (not thunderbolt) and 128 GB RAM. About 5 days ago I plugged in a 2.5" FW800 drive (in OWC Mercury enclosure) and the computer froze. Since then, anytime I connect a FW or USB thumb drive the computer freezes, forcing a hard shut down with the front power button. One core is pegged at near 100% when the computer becomes unresponsive, but there's nothing informative in Activity Monitor. I unplugged it and pressed and held the power button for 20 seconds. I booted from a USB drive with Mountain Lion on it so I know the USB port is good. From that boot, I repaired the drive and repaired permissions. Everything seemed fine. So, I rebooted...

...and lost my bluetooth connection. In the Network pane I had the message "Bluetooth PAN is not connected". I plugged in an old Apple USB Mighty mouse and it worked just fine. I then plugged in the ML USB drive and the computer froze again. I reset the PRAM twice. That brought back bluetooth. However, connecting the USB thumb drive freezes the computer.

There is nothing connected to the computer except my Apple keyboard and there are no PCI cards installed. WTF is going on here?
 
How about starting with some Apple Hardware diagnostics and memtest?

It seems like anything that places an additional power draw seems to invoke the problem.
 
Have you tried reinstalling OSX from the recovery partition?

Backup your data and reinstall. It shouldn't be destructive to your files (but if something goes wrong use the backup), but you'll lose your OS settings (they'll be like new again).
 
crjackson2134 said:
Have you tried reinstalling OSX from the recovery partition?

Backup your data and reinstall. It shouldn't be destructive to your files (but if something goes wrong use the backup), but you'll lose your OS settings (they'll be like new again).
Click to expand...

OK, did this with an Archive and Install and the problem persisted. Did a clean install without MA and the problem went away. Did a clean install with MA and the problem returned. Did a clean install and only MA'd the Applications and the problem returned. Clearly, there's some application file that's getting transferred over that is causing the problem.

Ugh. This is really frustrating.
 
Well it seems you will be in for a long weekend :rolleyes: You'll have to make a working install, then bring in your apps. one at a time and test for the problem after each.

You should work backwards, starting with the most recently installed apps. first. Hopefully you find the problematic app. sooner that way.
 
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