My mac won't start up

M

Mr_D

Registered
Hi everyone,

I'm having some trouble. I have a mac pro, have had it for a couple of years now with no real problems.

Anyway last week a friend lent me a copy off simcity 4, now before you say anything its a legit copy not pirated or anything, I played it for a couple of days off the cd found it fun so decided to install it today. it seemed to install fine, I started up the program and it all looked fine, went to get a drink while it loaded, when I got back the computer was off. Now every time i try to start it up it gets to the gray screen with a apple and the little round loading bar thing and just stops.

I've tried booting into safe mode by holding down shift, it does exactly the same. I've tried holding down command (apple), ctrl, P, R, exactly the same. I've tried putting the installation disk in and holding down C, same. With the installation disk in I've tried holding down alt when restarting like you do to boot into bootcamp and then choosing the installation disk when it comes up as one of the options, exactly the same just gets to the gray screen with the apple and stops.

Is there anything i can do or is this a job for the professionals?

Thanks for looking.
 
I think its something to do with the drive. The drives on those are easy enough to pull. For a little test pull the drive and try booting to your installer and see if it shuts down with the drive disconnected.
 
A MacPro might have the boot camp on its own hard drive. If that's the case, you can also try the Windows boot with the Mac hard drive removed.
 
Thanks for those suggestions.

I just tried your idea djackmac, sorry to say I still cant get past the loading screen with the drive removed . Its all on one drive so I couldn't try that DeltaMac but thanks anyway.
 
Do both memory riser cards have RAM installed on them? You may want to try booting it with one riser card installed at a time. If you only have RAM installed on the top card, just swap the RAM off of the top card and install it on the bottom card, then put the bottom card in the top slot and see what happens.
 
djackmac said:
Do both memory riser cards have RAM installed on them? You may want to try booting it with one riser card installed at a time. If you only have RAM installed on the top card, just swap the RAM off of the top card and install it on the bottom card, then put the bottom card in the top slot and see what happens.
Click to expand...

Thanks, just tried that, no change :(.

One thing I did noticed is that when starting it up the fans ramp up as if getting ready to start and then just fade away, and they do that three or four times. Then just go back to idel before the round loading bar (whatever its called) appears underneath the apple symbol. Dont know if that's of any help.
 
From what you are saying it is trying to boot to something then shutting off. Do you have a disk in the optical drive? What might be helpful is to make sure there is no boot device (HD, optical, or external) and then try starting it up. Then theoretically it should come to the flashing ? folder. But at least it should hopefully stay running at that point and help us figure out if is a boot device thats causing the shutdowns.
 
djackmac said:
From what you are saying it is trying to boot to something then shutting off. Do you have a disk in the optical drive? What might be helpful is to make sure there is no boot device (HD, optical, or external) and then try starting it up. Then theoretically it should come to the flashing ? folder. But at least it should hopefully stay running at that point and help us figure out if is a boot device thats causing the shutdowns.
Click to expand...

OK the only thing like that i suppose is the installation disk in the internal drive, there's nothing ells plugged in. It does the same thing without the installation disk in though.

Thanks very much for all your time and your suggestions, but I've arranged to take the mac pro to a mac repair shop this afternoon so hopefully he can figure it all out.
 
I've got my computer back now. I thought you guys mite like to know what was wrong with it.

It turned out that it had got clogged up with dust from some recent building work, witch caused the motherboard and graphics card to overheat and fail...

Luckily they managed to repair them both and its back up and running now.

Only one minor problem now but I'll make a new thread about that.
 
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