WWYD: replacing sick Mac Pro

[neophyte]

Oops, I re-read your original thread and now recall that the Mac Pro with my original Mac Mini cloned system was not "fine"; upon booting it said something about "kext not found" several times (several different kexts I guess). And several apps did not open either, though Chrome did. When I discovered the dragged partitions didn't open I started over.

[C(-)ris]

neophyte wrote:
About 2 months ago I bought a 2010 Mac Pro 2 X 2.93GHz (12-Cores) Xeon 1TB 32GB MC561LL/A-BTO + B Grade from isellimac on eBay. Paid about $1225 shipped. Its was sent in a Mac Pro box and arrived promptly. The only issue is although all 8 RAM slots have RAM sticks (4GB each), when it boots a little popup screen says the RAM slots are not populated in order, and it only sees seven of the eight sticks. I guess either one stick or one slot is bad.

That is VERY common in CPU swaps when the processor isn't seated correctly you lose a slot of ram. Are you sure it is a legit 2010 Mac Pro 2x2.93 and not a 2009 flashed to a 2010 with those CPUs installed?

I would have sent that machine right back to them.

[hal]

One thing to consider in buying from ebay is the seller's ability to properly ship a MP. It's very hard to do it properly without the original box. SOme take the effort to ensure that it will arrive save, some won't. I recently bought a mac mini on ebay and it shipped in a padded envelope!

Once bought an MP that arrive in a box 2" larger than the MP in every direction - all four handles/legs were completely crushed.

If you need some RAM, I have 32GB (4x8) of OWC 1333 ram that I bought by accident. You want it? I might owe you a favor.

[GuyGene]

All I know is that I agree with you on the iMac and mini. Those two have never appealed to me, like the Cube didn't. Old Steve was obsessed with that design in the '90s, and that might be why Apple hasn't yet made a decent pro since the '12 model year.

[ka jowct]

hal wrote:
One thing to consider in buying from ebay is the seller's ability to properly ship a MP. It's very hard to do it properly without the original box. SOme take the effort to ensure that it will arrive save, some won't. I recently bought a mac mini on ebay and it shipped in a padded envelope!

Once bought an MP that arrive in a box 2" larger than the MP in every direction - all four handles/legs were completely crushed.

If you need some RAM, I have 32GB (4x8) of OWC 1333 ram that I bought by accident. You want it? I might owe you a favor.

Thanks a bunch, but I don't think I'll need it. I currently have two 8GB sticks in there. If I can get the drive weirdness sorted, I will reinstall the 16GB sticks to see if anything changes.

It's hard to believe anyone was dumb enough to ship a Mini in a padded envelope; did it work?

One of the auctions I've flagged is from a NYC seller. Unfortunately, no local pickup. Still, it would not have to travel far.

Packing is always a concern. I found another auction that promised shipment in the original box.

[jdc]

GuyGene wrote:
All I know is that I agree with you on the iMac and mini. Those two have never appealed to me, like the Cube didn't.

Your loss, our gain.

Cube was great. DIY ram, HDD and GPU. Everything you guys *think* you want but would never ugrade if you even could.

[space-time]

ka jowct wrote:
... I just hooked up the drive that I was using when this all started, and it is screwed up on my laptop, too. It won't boot, except to the recovery partition, and two volumes are locked, with no apparent way to unlock them or even view the contents.

Same admin user on every system.

Maybe it is not the hardware after all. Maybe it is software.
get a NEW drive and install OS X from DVD on that drive. Does it work?

[neophyte]

C(-)ris wrote:
[quote=neophyte]
About 2 months ago I bought a 2010 Mac Pro 2 X 2.93GHz (12-Cores) Xeon 1TB 32GB MC561LL/A-BTO + B Grade from isellimac on eBay. Paid about $1225 shipped. Its was sent in a Mac Pro box and arrived promptly. The only issue is although all 8 RAM slots have RAM sticks (4GB each), when it boots a little popup screen says the RAM slots are not populated in order, and it only sees seven of the eight sticks. I guess either one stick or one slot is bad.

That is VERY common in CPU swaps when the processor isn't seated correctly you lose a slot of ram. Are you sure it is a legit 2010 Mac Pro 2x2.93 and not a 2009 flashed to a 2010 with those CPUs installed?

I would have sent that machine right back to them.
System serial number identifies as Mid 2010 model. Is there another way to confirm this?

[ka jowct]

I got one of the internal drives back by running BatChmod to unlock it and reset permissions. Then I cloned my backup onto to it. Running from it now.

Every drive that was connected and running when the whatever-it-was happened is messed up: locked, no access due to permissions error. I have decent backups, but this is going to take a long time.

I'm not sure how much I can trust the machine, even if I get all the drives working. It's been having start-up issues for 1-2 years. It was also locking up when trying to wake from sleep, which is why I've been shutting it down when I'm not using it.

[Buzz]

Get a new active SCSI terminator, and be sure there are no duplicate SCI ID numbers, and also be sure not to hot swap any ADB devices.
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