No MacPro earlier than late-2013 have Internet Recovery, your assumption that Mac Pros mid-2010 and mid-2012 have it is incorrect.
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MP All Models Mac Pro Help Needed (New to macs)
- Thread starter supra3turbo
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if there was RAM in the box when he gave it to your then, should put it all back in.
If he reformatted the drive. Shut the machine down and then removed a bunch of stuff , the standard practice then is to turn it back on with hardware going to get it with. If it doesn't start then then don't pay. [ Pretty good chance there the previous owner doesn't have a "clean" install image to get the system running. So sold it and and "ran". ]
This sounds like he erased formatted the drive ( to remove his data and stuff ) and left a completely empty drive. The system won't work natively (just EFI boot) with the video card involved. So it is basically a door stop.
Macs from that era are supposed to transfer the boot CD-ROMs that came with the harddare along with the system hardware. MacOS isn't suppose to be decoupled from a Mac.
With the CD-ROMs, someone could do a "clean" install of macOS X on standard hardware. ( the non standard GPU card though would throw a bit of a curveball here. would need to create a semicustom clean install image. ( e.g. add an admin account, erase the other accounts and apps, backup (disk clone) , erase disk , restore, and then image that. It can be done, but work. )
Windows boxes from 2006 era similarly would have had "OS Recovery" CD-ROMS and/or a "reinstall Windows" partition on the drive. Roughly the same thing probably not being followed here on the transfer.
The scope of 2010 models moved forward is in the article I linked in. I said some 2010 Mac models. Not all Mac models
The 2010 Mac Pro is primarily a 2009 Mac Pro with some minor firmware bump. The 2012 Mac Pro is an even lamer minor firmware bump. They are all fundamentally 2008-9 era development hardware from a firmware perspective.
Nothing happened until 2013 in Mac Pro because Apple was using the same primary logic board hardware from 2009-2013. So yeah ... they all missed Internet recovery 2011 tech.
None of the OS stuff matters, until GPU and RAM are sorted.
The Mac boot tone is as close as we get to POST. If you hear that, RAM passed the POST test, as did all other hardware (in the test).
Even with no OS, or even no hard drives, a functioning Mac will give a boot tone, and should have a flashing question mark on the screen.
The Mac boot tone is as close as we get to POST. If you hear that, RAM passed the POST test, as did all other hardware (in the test).
Even with no OS, or even no hard drives, a functioning Mac will give a boot tone, and should have a flashing question mark on the screen.
PC GPUs that are not flashed don't show anything on the screen until macOS loads the GPU drivers. So, a PC GPU not flashed will show nothing without a working macOS install.
Also some Macs don't have the chime, this is extremely common with early-2009, mid-2010, mid-2012 that had MP51.0087.B00 installed.
If I were trying to troubleshoot a questionable Mac...I would not want to do it with a flashed video card if at all possible, so I would not recommend it to others, especially somebody new to Mac hardware. Not to mention possible sleep/stability issues.
OP says on the 1st post that the GPU of his Mac Pro is a GT610 and he don't mention having a 7300GT or any other 32-bit EFI Mac GPU to check it.