Mac Pro won't boot past gray screen?

[NewComer]

Before 2 days, my Mac Pro started freezing during boot process. After pushing the power button on the cabinet, the chime goes off, the grey screen come up with the spinning 'gear', but after five seconds everything gonna freezing. There is no way to get the logging screen and I have had to perform the forcefully shut down procedure.

The machine even freezes when I try and boot from the 10.5 disk that came with the system, as well as with my retail copy of Snow Leopard. Therefore, I have tried booting the Mac Pro through the target disk mode, and tried to repair the disk using Disk tools on my MacBook Pro, but this didn't have such effect. Before going to any shop to resolve this, if anyone had any suggestions , it would be greatly appreciated.

[MrChris-]

While it could be a damaged hard drive or other hardware failure, it does also seems a bit such as an problem I had with a bluetooth headset during it plugged into charging. Apparently it was unused, and the Mac was trying to boot from it. So, the first thing to try is disconnect everything except keyboard and mouse. Try it without a keyboard and mouse and find out what happens. If you have a monitor or keyboard that doubles as a USB hub, disconnect everything out of those. Hopefully this will do the same as trick. Then it will be just a case of figuring out what the destroyed USB device was.

If that not comes into work... you said you booted the Mac Pro in target disk mode? Was that going on success, as in the other Mac was able to read/write to that Mac Pro's drive?

[NewComer]

Yes, when the issue first started, I booted in target disk mode and was capable to recover the data I required from the Mac Pro's Mac OS hard drive. The weird thing is that it would not even started to boot from the DVD, it still getting freezes, so it enables me to think that it is a hardware problem, but any other advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

[Calvin K]

Hello everyone,

Are you able to boot within the single user mode? (command-s during boot). According to me, when I had that issue, I had to remove com.apple.loginwindow.plist and com.apple.windowserver.plist and the only method to get at them, if you are not running with a secondary partition to boot into, is via single-user command line. If you consistently getting the same error then you need to replace the drive and I don't think there is any way to do more

[Lillebror]

I am also suffering with the same issue one day, wouldn't boot up and would stick on the grey screen with the apple logo and spinning spindle, that time I thought I should share my suffer with you guys. So once it started happening I very quickly get this thread and tried everything guided:

single user mode would hang
ditto verbose
archive and install reported there were errors, try again

tried target firewire mode, which although I could find out the directory hierarchy of the system's hard drive, was insanely slow to even navigate through. I then tried to generate an image of the disk using disk tools on an external firewire hard disk, that did not perform well, reporting input/output errors.