Mac pro 2,1 - fix it or kill it?

[hotswapster]

Hey folk. I'm Jay and I'm new here. I recently acquired a Mac Pro 2,1 with two processors and lots of RAM. I was hoping to make this my new server at home as it has more grunt that my HP Microserver.

Background
It was running Lion and I decided to try and install rEFInd to boot Ubuntu on it. At the time I thought I had a 4,1 but have learnt since, that is not the case. I've successfully installed rEFInd on my iMac with no problems.

Issue
The issue now is after rebooting from the rEFInd install, I get a startup chime and a grey screen. Nothing else... no icons, no mouse. I have tried:

• NVRAM and SMC resets
• Holding down option for a boot menu
• Booting to Recovery mode (doesn't get past a grey screen)
• All of the above with other bootable linux disks (SATA and USB)
• Hard disk into another machine can see the EFI partition and everything in it

rEFInd also says it programs the NVRAM which is what I think is broken. I don't have an optical drive or a restore disc. Having spent almost 3 days so far trying to get this working again, I see I have two options:

1. Realise this hardware to too old for what I want and get something else
2. Get help from one of you friendly folk to figure out how to boot it into anything. I'm confident if I can get anything to boot, I can fix the start-up/boot manager

If anyone with some knowledge around this machine or fixing boot errors could help, it'd be much appreciated please.

Regards,

Jay

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

Sorry to hear of your issues. Unfortunately, I don't recommend things like rEFInd Boot Manager or rEFIt, as they can cause Macs to become unstable and unbootable due to they way they interact with the EFI. It could be that it became corrupted, or some hardware in the Mac Pro isn't compatible with it.

Honestly, the best thing would be to contact rEFInd support, as they would have the most knowledge and troubleshooting ability with their product.

C