[geeks] Dead Mac Pro

[shannon at widomaker.com]

The Mac Pro that I bought on 6 October died Friday (yesterday morning) just 
over a month old.

It was running, and dropped to the gray screen of death, and the sound was 
looping.

Now it won't boot.  

It's not just that the OS won't come up, even the firmeware won't run.  No 
keyboard handler starts, no bong, etc.

The fans work, and the DVD seeks constantly, but that's about it.  The 
machine appears to be trying to go through its initial boot over and over.

No reaction to SMC reset or any of the usual Mac resurrection steps.  Since 
they keyboard and video both are dead, there isn't much you can do anyway.

About every fifth power cycle, the hard drive won't spin up, it just buzzes.

I booted the machine with it completely disconnected, with the hard drives 
removed, and even with memory removed.  It never comes up even then.  If you 
remove memory, it is supposed to bong and then chirp.  No joy.

Motherboard diagnostic LEDs stay off.

It appears the machine is very thoroughly and completely dead.

It's acted a little odd since I got it.  Everyone here and elsewhere gushed 
about how great the Mac Pro was, but in my case it frequently crashed hard
and never seemed to obey its power saving settings.

I have been very busy since I got it, and most of the problems seemed to have 
gone away in the last week and a half.  Removing a USB video device seemed to 
stop most (but not all) of the crashes I was seeing.

Then Friday, it just 'went away'.  Just before it died completely, it started 
getting sluggish like it was under a high load, and then it perished with
little fanfare.

I scheduled a meeting with a "Genius" Sunday, the earliest time they had.

I'm going to box the machine up minus my extra hard drive and take it in, and 
I hope they just replace the whole thing.