Mac Pro 2008 Booting problem

[kevink2]

I decided to repartition my boot drive with Boot Camp last night. System working fine for years up until this point.

It is working away for awhile, then reboots. Install of Windows then fails, guess it didn't think the disk was accessible.

Anyway, the system couldn't find a bootable disk anymore.

I also couldn't invoke the recovery partition anymore using CMD R. Couldn't boot off of a copy of the Lion DVD with C. Option doesn't bring up a choice of disks to boot off of.

I even made a bootable USB drive of Lion, it won't boot off of that either.

I decided to try inserting a blank hard drive into the system, removing all existing hard drives.

Also tried to boot off the Disc 1 of the disc that came with the Mac Pro. Just stays on the gray Apple screen, doesn't boot.

However, if I stick in a Knoppix DVD, it boots fine, I get X invoked on both displays, and I'm able to see and partition the hard drive.

Is there a failure case where out of the blue OSX doesn't boot anymore? Or did boot camp do something to the PRAM?

I've tried the OPT CMD P R to reset the PRAM, but I don't get the additional tones the web pages say I should get.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Kevin

 

[kevink2]

I noticed the internal battery today. Disconnected it for awhile, then connected it again. Regression, I can't even boot off a Linux DVD anymore.

Which indicates to me that the PRAM is somehow to blame. But the CMD-OPT-P-R still doesn't do anything.

Attempts to boot off of USB DVD gives me the Question Mark folder or just a Folder. I'm unable to try the internal drive again since I cannot get it to open.

 

[kendall69]

Same thing happened to me four times. Twice it was failing RAM. Remove ram till it boots.

One time it was the power supply. Once it was the mother board.

I also had a similar hard drive not booting, and I could never repair it. I ended up formatting the drive and all was fine.

 

[kevink2]

Same thing happened to me four times. Twice it was failing RAM. Remove ram till it boots.

One time it was the power supply. Once it was the mother board.

I also had a similar hard drive not booting, and I could never repair it. I ended up formatting the drive and all was fine.

Progress this morning. I disconnected the CMOS battery again (kind of a pain close to video card), and while leaving it disconnected, booted up this time and did the PRAM reset. It actually reset and rebooted quickly (I had waited several minutes in the recent past attempting this futilely). I am actually booted up in the hardware diagnostics right now off the original OSX disks that came with the computer.

If this works, I'll reconnect the battery and see it it continues to work.

 

[kevink2]

It passed the hardware tests, and I now have all the drives visible. I had bent one of my SATA connectors, meaning one of my drives wasn't working.