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Mac Pro 3,1 (Early 2008) Booting Woes

Hi all,


I could really use some help from this knowledgable community to get an old MacPro 3,1 back up and running.


Basically for a bit of background, our IT department at work we’re having an equipment clear out and I managed to bag a Mac Pro 3,1 without any drives with the intention of setting it up as a perfectly good home Mac/Windows machine. I will try to be as descriptive as possible but please bear with me.


The computer in question has not been used in at least 5 years so my first port of call was to give it a good clean out and check components, reseat risers etc - all good.


Next, I took a fresh HDD and installed a copy of El Capitan on it using another Mac. The drive boots up and works well in my external drive caddy - all good.


I put the HDD inside the Mac. Boot screen appears (albeit with some artefacts on the screen so I know the 8800GT is on its way out but still displays an image) and the loading bar gets to about 50% and hangs. I leave it for half an hour or so and nothing happens - odd. I carry out an SMC, PRAM and RTC reset (new battery for the latter). Still nothing.


I check the status lights on the logic board and the RAM risers. Nothing unusual there.


I try to install El Capitan on a fresh SSD (as before) - same result.


I do the same with a fresh copy of OSX Lion on an HDD and and SSD - hangs in both cases but then continues to boot loop (powering up, getting to 50% or so on the loading screen and restarting)


Try to boot the Mac directly from the installer USB - same result with boot looping.


EDIT: Tried recovery mode and safe mode - same hanging


Try with different RAM and riser combos (taking it back to 2GB, I have 6 sticks in total equal to 8GB) - same result every time.


I shove in an old Windows10 drive - boots and works like a charm with no bootlooping or restarting issues, really odd!?


I can load single user mode and Verbose in terms of Mac things, but apart from that the only drive that’ll boot is one with windows on. The only conceivable error I can see (and even then I have to admit I don’t know enough about Mac OS to know if it is one) is kSMCKeyNotFound when using Verbose.


I’d really appreciate any advice that anybody can give to give this machine a new lease of life. It’s great I can get into windows but I don’t know why OS X will just continue to boot loop.


Any help is gratefully received :)


Thank you!

Earlier Mac models

Posted on Oct 28, 2024 8:06 AM

Reply
1 reply

Oct 28, 2024 9:06 AM in response to ARS_95

Wait, "Boot screens" uses a very simple drawing mechanism, then jumps up to fully hardware accelerated, at the end of showing you the progress bar, which is often not all the way across. If the screen never makes the jump to fully accelerated video mode, that could easily produce the symptoms you describe.


Get a "real" graphics card, and try your initial best guess experiment again. There may be NOTHING wrong except what you already know about the bad graphics card.

Mac Pro 3,1 (Early 2008) Booting Woes

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