Mac Pro 5,1 won't boot - stuck on spinner - need help

[RayZorFIst]

Hello folks,

A bit of a long-winded explanation here as background to my troubles of today.

Old 2007 Mac Pro (8 core) running OS X 10.7.5 (Lion, I believe) died. Thought it was a hard drive issue at first so I replaced that Seagate drive with new 3TB HGST model and Carbon Copy Cloned the original boot drive using a different Mac. That did not work. Old Mac is pretty much toast.

Got a new to me 2012 Mac Pro (12 core!) this week to replace the dead 2007 Mac Pro.

Moved the drives to the new machine and powered it up with the newer HGST drive as the boot drive and things appeared to be working fine.

Ran it off and on for a couple days without incident.

I made some important changes for my on-line backup on the new HGST drive and computer configuration for my network during those couple days. (Important note for later)

Today, did a spotlight search for a file and the spotlight window hung. Tried to do a Force Quit on Finder and do a Relaunch and Finder disappeared entirely. No menu bar, no dock, nothing! I had to do a hard power off.

Now the new Mac won't boot. Get the POST chime and screen lights up with Apple logo and spinner just spins and spins and spins. I let it wait an hour but nothing but the logo and spinner.

I suspect my HGST drive may be the problem. Maybe the hard power off did something to it? The Mac will boot with the original drive that came with it and it will also boot with my original Seagate drive.

I mounted the HGST drive on another Mac as an external drive and ran Disk Utility on it. No errors when I did First Aid.

I don't have a startup disk with Lion on it and I cannot seem to get the 2012 Mac to launch Safe Mode or even any Diagnostics.

I tried holding the shift key down while booting and held it down for 10 minutes. No progress bar, just the spinner and logo.

I tried holding the D key down while booting for about 10 minutes. No Diagnostics appeared, just the spinner and logo.

I would really like to keep the HGST drive as the primary boot drive since I made the changes I mentioned for my on-line backup and computer configuration.

Any suggestions on how to accomplish this?

How can I get my Mac to go into safe mode or even diagnostic mode? I tried all the suggestions I found on-line and nothing works.

Hopefully you people smarter than me will have some suggestions.

Cheers!
TJ

 

[h9826790]

There are 4 bays in the Mac, put your original HDD (if that's really the original one, and never ever made a clean OS installation by someone else) back in, the diagnostic mode should work. Of course, you can boot from that HDD already. No need to go into diagnostic mode.

You can boot your Mac with both the original HDD and the HGST drive at there. Is the HGST still shows no error in this case (both the drive AND partition)? Or as long as the HGST drive is there, the Mac won't boot?

 

[RayZorFIst]

You can boot your Mac with both the original HDD and the HGST drive at there. Is the HGST still shows no error in this case (both the drive AND partition)? Or as long as the HGST drive is there, the Mac won't boot?

Yes, the new Mac will boot with the old HD.

What I ended up doing was CCC'ing the original Seagate Drive again onto the HGST drive and then after that completed put the HGST drive back in the Mac and it booted fine.

I did lose some data because of the re-clone because I forgot I had modified more files than I thought, but my Backblaze backup determined I was all out of whack and froze my backup so I could recover the newly modified files from the last few days.

That's downloading now. I figure once the download is finished and I and put the files back, reset my computer configuration and backup software again, then Bob's your uncle!

Cheers,
TJ

 

[orph]

sounds like the drive may have died,