First Screen lockup on New Mac Pro.

[geon]

Well, I was reloading a web page and I got the spinning beach ball and I couldn't force quit or do anything. Computer went to sleep for a about a minute, but woke up when I moved my bluetooth keyboard....blue screen with motionless ball in the middle. Finally, figured out I had to hold the power button down for 5 seconds to shutdown.
I went a week without a hiccup, so last night I added my 4 gb of ram, ran great up until this event this evening.

Here's the report. Can anyone decipher it for me? Not sure it will tell me anything.
2x2.8 Mac Pro.

Thu Feb 14 19:59:35 2008
panic(cpu 2 caller 0x001246E5): "ipc_right_clean: strange type"@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1228.3.13/osfmk/ipc/ipc_right.c:628
Backtrace, Format - Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack)
0x811b7e28 : 0x12b0e1 (0x457024 0x811b7e5c 0x13321a 0x0)
0x811b7e78 : 0x1246e5 (0x456d6c 0xe09 0xaffc8e0 0x9fe1ba8)
0x811b7eb8 : 0x13b5dc (0x98631f8 0x202 0x811b7f08 0x36e09b)
0x811b7f08 : 0x370271 (0x9fe1ba8 0x0 0x1 0x0)
0x811b7f58 : 0x37029f (0xa1e7560 0x0 0x9f83864 0x377343)
0x811b7f78 : 0x3dbe77 (0xa1e7560 0x9f83820 0x9f83864 0x0)
0x811b7fc8 : 0x19f084 (0x9f7f200 0x0 0x1a20b5 0xa11be40)
No mapping exists for frame pointer
Backtrace terminated-invalid frame pointer 0xbffffcd8

BSD process name corresponding to current thread: mDNSResponderHel

Mac OS version:
9C31

[threeprong]

I have no idea what the above report means, however, I would suggest running a memory test .

Trouble-shooting a mac with bad memory is very difficult. ELiminate the new RAM as the culprit and verify that it is good , clean running memory before spending much time on setting up this machine.

3P

[tortoise]

The obvious question is where did you get your RAM please? I have 16GB sitting here awaiting the delivery of my new MacPro due in Monday so I am curious to hear your outcome on this.

[geon]

I got my ram at expercom, with the Mac Pro. Any recommendations on testing the ram? I've been researching for about 40 minutes, time to walk the dog.

[Article Accelerator]

[quote geon]Any recommendations on testing the ram?[
Yes--don't bother with memory testers. They're very prone to false negatives.

The best test is to remove all but the original RAM and use your machine. If the problem goes away, third-party RAM is the most likely suspect.

[tortoise]

I got mine from our sponsor OWC, according to Jamie they test every unit they sell and I believe him, as I have never yet had a bad stick from them and I buy a fair amount on a regular basis. As a dual platform tech for over 12 years now I have seen the grief bad RAM can cause and the difficulty of diagnosing it. Lots of tools for troubleshooting on the PC side, but much less to choose from on the Mac side. Good luck! If you revert to the stock RAM it shipped with and the problem goes away I would be looking for a RMA, they may provide you with a good tool for testing the RAM installed as it is. Remember if you remove the new RAM and the problem goes away then the problem is rightly tossed back to the vendor that sold the RAM to help you overcome the problem.

Looking at the expercom site it appears they only have the DDR2 at 667MHz and don’t show any listing for the DDR2 at 800MHz required for the new MacPros released in January this year. So I am assuming you have the earlier model? If you just bought the MacPro recently you may have mismatched speeds? Just a thought.

One of the nice things about our sponsors site is they provide more than enough information to allow us to make intelligent and correct choices and get the right part the first time. In my opinion their web site is a work of art and I seldom need to call for any help, I just place the order and it is delivered and most importantly it just works. In my business I can’t afford bad RAM so OWC is my vendor of choice for the Mac, and Crucial works for the PC side. I think I have had one bad order from Crucial and none from OWC over many years.

[btfc]

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/24508&mode=feedback

[Webster J. Duck]

I've had a few squirrely things happen with my 2x2.8 and I think there have been a lot of little buggy issues with the early '08s.

That said, I'm running 8GB in 4x2GB from OWC and the system is actually running great. Delivery of the RAM was record time too. Very pleased.

I suspect a lot of my issues are caused by old software not compatible with the combination of 10.5 and an '08 intel mac. These things will be ferreted out in time.

[geon]

I saw rember on version tracker when I was looking....looks somewhat complicated.

Expercom had the right ram when I bought my early 2008 Mac Pro. I noticed they no longer have it in stock. I plan on buying my next set from OWC, almost did today when I purchased a harddrive from them.

Like I said, this was my first lockup. Prior to the lockup I did reset my modem and Airport extreme and hooked up the to the ethernet 2 port instead of using ethernet 1.
I did this because I noticed since hooking up the new Mac Pro, I've had some intermittent internet timeouts and some webpages seem to hang at times until I reload. However, most times the net is instantaneous..I was thinking it was safari at times or modem, router or connection. All this was happening without the 3rd party ram.

[Webster J. Duck]

Geon, I really have had more trouble with this 2x2.8 Mac Pro than any computer in recent memory. And I've owned a lot of Macs. Not catastrophic issues, but a lot of little issues. (constant panics would be different, but I haven't experienced that). I really suspect as time goes by we'll have an answer or an update.

I can add not shutting down and not waking from sleep to the issues I've had.