Dear all,
I have been using a Mac Pro first gen 8 core workstation for about 3 years. Overall very happy about it.
For a few months I had been experiencing annoying stability issues symptomized by:
- chronic inability to boot, the machine would start booting and then automitcally reboot before reaching the log-in screen,
- sudden auto-shut down without recognizable pattern, often early during sessions but not always.
I had started to feel that the machine had perhaps devlopped fundamental H/W issues justifying a round trip to Apple for repair, but was concerned that because of the non repeatible nature of the issue they might not be able to debug the situation, which would have required a costly replacement.
I was luck enough to find the likely cause of the problem last week. It was the air exhaust grid of the ATI graphic card behing plugged with a 2 mm thick layer of dust...
Users with similar issues might want to check that out. It requires removing the graphic card from the PCI ports (which itselfs first requires to dis-connect the small power cable from the graphic card), cleaning and then putting it back in. A 5 mins operation at worst.
Good luck.
Cheers,
Bernard