Mac Pro wont display anything

[Ravich]

History:

A few months ago I replaced my Mac Pro's default video card with a GTX 570. This card works fine with OSX, but unfortunately it isnt officially supported, so any time I hold option when booting, it wont display anything (screen remains black).

I got around this by simply altering the default startup disk whenever I wanted to boot into windows. Once in windows I could change the startup disk from the bootcamp menu in the toolbar to boot back into OSX.

Yesterday I attempted to boot into windows, but my mac pro wouldnt display anything. After 10 minutes or so, I shut it down, and tried again to no avail.


The problem is that normally if an issue occurs I can just reset the p ram in order to boot back into OSX as normal. This didnt seem to have any effect. Still a black screen.

Then I tried swapping out the GTX 570 for the original video card it came with. This would normally solve any issue of this sort, but still nothing is displayed.

At a loss here. Any ideas?

 

[Machines]

History:

A few months ago I replaced my Mac Pro's default video card with a GTX 570. This card works fine with OSX, but unfortunately it isnt officially supported, so any time I hold option when booting, it wont display anything (screen remains black).

I got around this by simply altering the default startup disk whenever I wanted to boot into windows. Once in windows I could change the startup disk from the bootcamp menu in the toolbar to boot back into OSX.

Yesterday I attempted to boot into windows, but my mac pro wouldnt display anything. After 10 minutes or so, I shut it down, and tried again to no avail.


The problem is that normally if an issue occurs I can just reset the p ram in order to boot back into OSX as normal. This didnt seem to have any effect. Still a black screen.

Then I tried swapping out the GTX 570 for the original video card it came with. This would normally solve any issue of this sort, but still nothing is displayed.

At a loss here. Any ideas?

Well, unless you bought a PC Edition GTX 570 that has EFI on it (flashed for Mac), you will not have EFI functions supported on your computer with this card . One of those functions is boot manager (press option key at start up) .

Have you tried to reset the motherboard ? Remove the power cord from your Mac for a minute and re-attach . Technically , it's just for 15 seconds but ... Let us know what happens and we'll take it from there .

 

[Ravich]

Right, I didnt know the term, but no EFI functions. I've been getting around that by just setting the startup disc within whichever OS I'm using.

I've removed the power cord several times for minutes at a time while I've been swapping out the video card, but it didnt change anything. I've even tried removing the HDD that has the bootable partitions to see if anything would show up, but that didnt seem to change anything. Really the EFI functions shouldnt be causing issues because I have the video card in there that came with the mac pro at the moment.


Edit: Tried putting the video card in the other x16 pcie slot, also tried removing various RAM sticks to see if that would be causing issues but there was no change.

Not sure at this point what would isolate the problem further. Since the USB controller for this mac pro has been finicky in the past, I'm half wondering if it's just not registering the keyboard at all when I give it prompts, but that seems pretty optimistic.

Is there a way to get it to boot from a DVD by default? Like if I boot it with no hard drives and bootable OSX DVD in the optical bay, will it by default boot from the DVD?

 

[Machines]

Right, I didnt know the term, but no EFI functions. I've been getting around that by just setting the startup disc within whichever OS I'm using.

I've removed the power cord several times for minutes at a time while I've been swapping out the video card, but it didnt change anything. I've even tried removing the HDD that has the bootable partitions to see if anything would show up, but that didnt seem to change anything. Really the EFI functions shouldnt be causing issues because I have the video card in there that came with the mac pro at the moment.


Edit: Tried putting the video card in the other x16 pcie slot, also tried removing various RAM sticks to see if that would be causing issues but there was no change.

Not sure at this point what would isolate the problem further. Since the USB controller for this mac pro has been finicky in the past, I'm half wondering if it's just not registering the keyboard at all when I give it prompts, but that seems pretty optimistic.

Is there a way to get it to boot from a DVD by default? Like if I boot it with no hard drives and bootable OSX DVD in the optical bay, will it by default boot from the DVD?

you might try a reduced configuration start up . remove all hard drives . remove all PCIe peripheral cards , including video cards , disconnect the optical drives and install only the minimum memory configuration . start up your Mac and listen for the chime . It's an audio indication your computer passed POST . If this happens , then it's a positive indication your Mac is basically healthy . You should then reattach individual components one at a time , repeating this test .

In a separate situation , pressing the C key at Start Up will load the OS X from an optical disk .

 

[ActionableMango]

The original video card has EFI and should show something.

Are you even hearing the boot chime? If you aren't hearing the chime, you're not even passing the POST.