Mac Pro freezing issues, please help!

[aimforsilence]

Alright so I have a 2009 Mac Pro 4,1 desktop with a 2.66GHz Xeon processor. I'm having this ongoing issue (for the past 2-3 weeks) where after anywhere from a minute to say 30 minutes or so the desktop completely freezes. No kernel panics, just a frozen desktop. Keyboard & mouse are both completely useless, so I have to hold down the power button on the front if the machine to shut it off. I brought it into apple and they kept it over night and ran all the tests they could through at it. When I got it back they said my boot drive (a WD 2TB 7200RPM 64mb cache) was bad, and that was why it was freezing. They told me besides that the machine is 100%. So I went out and bought a brand new Seagate 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB cache drive, installed it in bay 1 then installed OS X Mavericks and did all the updates. That fixed the problem (or so I thought), so I put my Windows Drive (bay 2), iTunes drive (bay 3), & my time machine drive (bay 4). Again all was well. Until today (little over a week since the last batch of freezes) when it started to freeze again. It never freezes for any specific reason or on any specific application.. It just randomly freezes. I've tried reinstalling mavericks at least a dozen times... No dice. I've tried different ram.. Again, didn't change anything. I even removed all my drives except my OS X boot drive (from bay 1) and that actually had it working the longest.. But in the end it froze anyways. Part of me thinks I might need to replace the Backplane Board.. I'm thinking it might be a SATA issue.. But I'm not sure enough to order the part. So if anyone with some more knowledge or experience with this sort of issue could help me out, that would be fantastic.

Thanks

 

[rixax]

mac pro freezing

Hi,
You mentioned that once you unmounted all your drives except the boot drive, things worked fine. Try mounting only one drive at a time. One of your drives/partitions might be the culprit.

The other possibility is that doe extension or background task is corrupt. Have you tried disc warrior to rebuild each drive?

Good luck.

Rick

 

[aimforsilence]

Hi,
You mentioned that once you unmounted all your drives except the boot drive, things worked fine. Try mounting only one drive at a time. One of your drives/partitions might be the culprit.

The other possibility is that doe extension or background task is corrupt. Have you tried disc warrior to rebuild each drive?

Good luck.

Rick

Yea after i removed my other 3 drives from my machine it worked longer then normal before it froze.. but in the end it still froze. All of my drives are about 2 weeks old.. excluding the windows drive.. but i don't really care about that one so much. Also i've not ran any disk warrior as i'm worried that I could lose info on my iTunes Drive or Time Machine Drive.. both of which are most important to me...

But no matter what I try, it freezes. Be it 1 minute after boot or 10.. it still freezes no matter what..

 

[h9826790]

Yea after i removed my other 3 drives from my machine it worked longer then normal before it froze.. but in the end it still froze. All of my drives are about 2 weeks old.. excluding the windows drive.. but i don't really care about that one so much. Also i've not ran any disk warrior as i'm worried that I could lose info on my iTunes Drive or Time Machine Drive.. both of which are most important to me...

But no matter what I try, it freezes. Be it 1 minute after boot or 10.. it still freezes no matter what..

Did you upgrade the RAM from 3rd party?

 

[aimforsilence]

Did you upgrade the RAM from 3rd party?

I upgraded the ram from the stock 3GB's it shipped with. It freezes under both the stock 3GB's & the 16GB's I bought. I was sure to buy the appropriate ram for my Mac Pro. So since it freezes with both the apple stock ram & my 16gb ram I don't think it's a ram issue.

 

[h9826790]

Sorry, I miss the part that you already test it with different RAM.

If you suspect it's SATA related, may be you can try to relocate your boot disk to Bay 2 - 4.To check if that's the problem from Bay 1.

 

[silby101]

Same here, did you find a fix?

I just upgraded my Mac Pro 2010 to Mavericks and have had nothing but problems, all the same as you. Random freezes of applications, Finder freezing and not being able to relaunch, all happening at random times within the first 30 minutes or so.

Did you figure out what was wrong?

 

[h9826790]

I just upgraded my Mac Pro 2010 to Mavericks and have had nothing but problems, all the same as you. Random freezes of applications, Finder freezing and not being able to relaunch, all happening at random times within the first 30 minutes or so.

Did you figure out what was wrong?

Do you have any extra HDD that to test if that happen to a clean install Mavericks as well?

 

[Riwam]

Also i've not ran any disk warrior as i'm worried that I could lose info on my iTunes Drive or Time Machine Drive.. both of which are most important to me...

............
I have often used Disk Warrior even in my boot drive (in such cases booting from another drive since you cannot check the drive from which you start Disk Warrior) and I never lost any programs, files or any other data.
From the different tools I tried I found Disk Warrior the most useful one.
If you are afraid, then don't use it. I can't take responsibility for other people. I can only say that as far as I am concerned, I never lost anything by rebuilding a drive with Disk Warrior.

 

[shindom]

Did you check your temperatures with temp software like iStats or temperature monitor ?

Did you run the the long Apple Hardware Test on your machine ?

I may be totally in the wrong, but random freezes/crashes can be a sign of hardware failures .. you may have a chip with too high temps .. like the northbridge or maybe your GPU is getting too hot ..

good luck !

 

[silby101]

Failing SSD

After a week of trying different combinations, reinstalling a fresh copy of Mavericks, moving hard drives around, re-mounting, and testing, it looks like it's a failing SSD that's the culprit. I had a SSD for my main OS drive (OCZ Vertex 2 which is just over 3 years old) and had moved my Home to a standard HD. I found that while my Home HD did have some SMART errors, it looks like it's my SSD that is starting to fail. I migrated my OS and Home to a new HD and haven't had any of the problems seen before. I just got a new SSD and will be migrating data to it as that seems to be the faulty hardware.

Thanks for all the suggestions!