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fhturner

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 7, 2007
629
413
Birmingham, AL & Atlanta, GA
I've got a Mac Pro 2009/4,1 that I'm building up that won't successfully come out of sleep mode. It goes to sleep fine and the light pulses; when you try any method to wake it, everything clicks back on, fans spin up, but no video displays, and it no longer is reachable on the network by ping or remote management (ARD). The only way out is a hard shutdown and restart.

This system is secondhand and otherwise works perfectly. I see from GSX that it has a support ticket from 2013 for "Intermittent shut down". No repair is shown, but apparently the backplane must've been replaced at some point, because it has updated MAC address stickers in the serial # area, and the backplane board is labeled as a "0081.B08".

I have updated the firmware to 5,1. I cannot say for sure that the issue was occurring w/ 4,1 firmware, and as you know, I cannot go back to 4,1 to check since the firmware was originally B08.

The system is 8-core 2.93GHz, although I have installed Xeon X5690 3.46GHz 6-core CPUs (and those work perfectly as well). The problem occurs w/ both CPU configs, as well as with a separate 2.26GHz 8-core tray.

Troubleshooting-wise, I've gone about as far as one can go: Of course, I've reset the SMC via Apple's power cord method, as well as swapping logic board battery and pressing the reset switch. I have removed the backplane itself and installed it into another tower, using EVERY other component (CPU tray, power supply, PCIe cards, front-panel board, etc) from the OTHER system, such that the ONLY item from the problematic Mac Pro in the test machine was the backplane board. And still it won't wake.

So, it would appear to be the backplane board. But why? Is the B08 firmware 4,1 board not conducive to 5,1 updating? Or is this just a faulty component that was likely doing this unnoticed on the 4,1 firmware too?

Thx,
Fred
 
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