Mac Pro 2008 freezes/crashes after sleep mode since upgrade to Snow Leopard

[sparkie7]

Ok, I was dreading upgrading my very stable Leopard system. As above in the subject title it now freezes/crashes after sleep mode since I upgraded to Snow Leopard last week.

It sleeps than never wakes up. The screens are still on (screensaver) but the keyboard is dead, when I hit the caps key - no green light. Hard escape (command + option + esc) doesn't work. I have to hold the power button at the front to hard shut it down. Then press it again to power up.

Did some googling and pulled up a couple of Apple Support threads:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2304923?start=0&tstart=0

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2306135?start=0&tstart=0

..but these are like over a year old, thought SL would have all bugs fixed by now and I have updated to 10.6.8 - the latest version of SL

Any ideas/tips/suggestions?

 

[Neodym]

Did you zap PRAM and reset the SMC?

 

[sparkie7]

I didn't formally. I did pull out all the cables from the Mac Pro, when I opened it up and installed the 2x new Hitachi drives, which is supposed to reset the SMC.

How do you reset the PRAM on a Mac Pro again please?

 

[Neodym]

Same as on any Mac: PRAM-Reset

You should keep the keys pressed until you heard the chime at least for the second or even third time after you started pressing the keys (reset is 2-level and you'll recognize the chime getting louder the second time, indicating a more complete zap).

Note that some 3rd party keyboards won't work for PRAM reset due to their internal startup routines (often the ones with bells and whistles like e.g. the Logitech G15 - a no-frills standard USB keyboard may work).

Did you repair permissions? Do you have any 3rd party driver installed that may have problems with SnowLeopard?

When i moved to SL i also moved to SSD and i think back then there have been reports on troubles during migration for some people (not fixable by an update, as the migration routines in the earlier SL revisions were said to screw up in the first place), which is why i opted for a clean install instead of upgrading. If you have a drive to spare, you may try that route as well...

 

[sparkie7]

Same as on any Mac: PRAM-Reset

You should keep the keys pressed until you heard the chime at least for the second or even third time after you started pressing the keys (reset is 2-level and you'll recognize the chime getting louder the second time, indicating a more complete zap).

Note that some 3rd party keyboards won't work for PRAM reset due to their internal startup routines (often the ones with bells and whistles like e.g. the Logitech G15 - a no-frills standard USB keyboard may work).

Thanks for the link

Did you repair permissions? Do you have any 3rd party driver installed that may have problems with SnowLeopard?

Not yet, is that via Disk Utility?

Yes I have ATI 4870 card installed as well as a ATI 3870. I think these have drivers which were installed.

Is there evidence that these could cause freezing/crashing?

When i moved to SL i also moved to SSD and i think back then there have been reports on troubles during migration for some people (not fixable by an update, as the migration routines in the earlier SL revisions were said to screw up in the first place), which is why i opted for a clean install instead of upgrading. If you have a drive to spare, you may try that route as well...

I really want to avoid a fresh install as it a major PIA to install everything and find all the support drivers etc

 

[Neodym]

Strange - i could 've sworn i answered that one yesterday...

Not yet, is that via Disk Utility?

Yes.

Yes I have ATI 4870 card installed as well as a ATI 3870. I think these have drivers which were installed.

IIRC in the beginning one had to use injector-type hacking to get the 4870 working under Leopard - if such kext's are still installed, they may now collide with the official support in SnowLeopard.

Is there evidence that these could cause freezing/crashing?

There have been reports that you should de-install "hacking-type" kext's/drivers before upgrading to an OSX rev. with official support, as some people experienced problems.

What i also could think of is your setup with two graphic cards as root cause. AFAIK the 3870 needs one additional power cable from the motherboard and the 4870 needs two of them. Makes a total of three - with only two ports available on the motherboard. Thus you either installed a Y-splitter or left out one power cable on either of your cards - in both cases i could imagine that SL gives a bigger load in general to the graphic card (offloading more calculations than e.g. Leopard) and then the increased power consumption could lead to failure due to lack of energy (which you did not notice under Leopard due to lower load). Admitted - just an educated guess here...

I really want to avoid a fresh install as it a major PIA to install everything and find all the support drivers etc

Hmmm - shouldn't drag-and-drop normally be sufficient to relocate a Mac application? Maybe on of those additional drivers is the culprit - if that's the case, a fresh install should run stably and you could at least rule out hardware issues, while installing the drivers one after the other until you run into stability problems again (then you found the malefactor...).

 

[sparkie7]

Thanks for your feedback Neodym.

For some reason my Mac Pro hasn't crashed for the 2-3 days. Not sure what's changed, I did do another update and remember it crachsing staright after. But since then (touch wood) so far so good.

If it acts up I'll reset the PRAM and do the repair permissions like you suggested above.

Again thank you