MP 1,1-5,1 Troubleshooting Mac Pro 5.1

[berna.pelle]

Hi guys, new poster here,

I just bought an "untested" Mac Pro 5.1 from 2010 off Vinted. It was quite cheap (for Europe at least) and I was looking for a Mac Pro to turn into a cold storage server to setup with a bunch of disks and a boot up routine to have a self updating offline copy of all the photos of our family.

Long story short: it arrived - slightly knocked off by the shipping company, but nothing too serious - and after a thorough cleaning I was able to boot it up, but no chime, no video output and no solid caps lock led from the keyboard attached. When it boots everything spins fine, and I can hear the HDD reading exactly as it would do loading the OS. The USB, both front and back do have at least some power, since I'm able to charge my headphones and an old BB with them, but apparently no signal. I already swapped the CMOS battery with a new one and tried all RAM configurations. DIAG LED gives me the "all nominal" output. Only weird behaviour - apart the above mentioned - is that, when I long press the power button to shut the Mac off, it shuts off but the cpu over temperature led lights up solid red and stays as that unless I unplug it from power and then plug it again.

I should also mention that the Mac appears to be completely stock, never upgraded or modded in any way.

Any clues?

Thank you a lot for any help you might give me! 🙏

 

[Bigwaff]

Some more details would be helpful ... what GPU model/specs is installed? Are you using an Apple wired keyboard?

 

[berna.pelle]

Thank you for your reply, it has the stock ATI Radeon 5770, 6gb stock ram, 1TB WD HDD, although I stripped it down to bare-bones and kept only a stick in the first socket and no HDD to try to get to the boot screen. Keyboard is just a Logitech keyboard I had lying around. I also tried with a bluetooth magic keyboard connected via lightning cable to no avail.

 

[reader50]

Try a different monitor. If your GPU does not recognize a monitor, it will boot with no video output. You could check the DHCP table in your router, to see if the 5,1 appears. That would be an independent confirmation that it did boot up, at least far enough for network drivers to load.

Do you have another Mac video card handy? If the 5770 is blown, that would also explain most symptoms.

 

[berna.pelle]

Tried connecting to my router via Ethernet. As I switch on the Mac the led on the router lights up and blinks as to show some activity, but unfortunately the Mac doesn’t show up in the list of connected devices.

I also tried to connect it to my TV via miniDP to HDMI. Still no image, but when I switch the Mac on the TV shows some infos about resolution and refresh rate (50Hz 4k), so I’m assuming it gets some kind of signal.

Till now I tried it with an LG 4k monitor and the tv in my living room, also 4k from LG. Should I give it a try with a lower resolution monitor?

I also tried to boot the Mac without gpu to see if at least I could get some sign of life from keyboard and mouse but no luck.

Anything else I should try?

 

[reader50]

Till now I tried it with an LG 4k monitor and the tv in my living room, also 4k from LG. Should I give it a try with a lower resolution monitor?

Yes, please. Try a 1080p monitor (or less) connected via the DVI port if possible. 4K monitors used to be a problem for earlier OS versions. And DVI tends to be the default output on old cards and/or old OS versions.

HDMI inputs on recent cheap TV/monitors sometimes demand HDCP encryption, which your old video card likely doesn't support. I ran into that with some cheap BestBuy 4K TV monitors - had to insert active adapters to go from DP -> HDMI inputs before the screens would show video.

 

[berna.pelle]

Thank you, I’ll try to get ahold of one in the coming days and post here the results. Keyboard and mouse not lighting up is expected behavior given the circumstances, or is it something I should worry about?

 

[reader50]

I'm not sure a PC keyboard will light the caps lock during boot when connected to a Mac. And while older mice show a red light under them, some of my mice use IR pad illumination - there's no visible light at all underneath. Even when they're working fine.

Without more data on keyboard & mice models, I'm ignoring them as inconclusive. You also don't know the macOS version installed, which makes it harder to troubleshoot with modern high-res monitors. Hence the advice to use an older, simpler monitor. And to check with an alternate Mac graphics card, if you had one.