HELP! Swapped new Quad in - Now Won't run OS X

[pablo631]

I got my cheap E2160 DC test system up and running smoothly. I got a little power hungry so I bought a Q6600 Quad to swap in. It posted fine. I adjust the bios before booting, selected my OS X drive partition, it gets to the grey apple logo loading screen...then after 15 seconds it just goes black. My monitor switches from digital to analog looking for a signal. I double checked my settings in the bios, everything is fine. It boots windows XP perfectly. Normally I would zap the Pram or safe boot, but not sure how that works on a hackintosh. Any ideas on how to get my quad going?

[EGOvoruhk]

What errors is it giving you?

 

I would just reinstall

[trance4jim]

Try booting from install disk anr repair permissions.

If that doesn't work, maybe a setting in bios is wrong.

Put your full system specs in you signature with install disk partition format(mbr/guid)

if you want better help on here!

[pablo631]

hey guys. Thanks for the help. I ended up just wiping the drive and reinstalling. Upon reinstall I realized it was my graphics driver. Which I probay could of fixed in safe boot. Oh well, reinstall is fairly painless. I have a new problem now ever since I swithced processors to the q6600 from my e2160 my system has been running pretty poorly. I figured I just needed to work out the kinks. Now I have another issue. I overclocked my q6600 to just over 3ghz. All temps were stable, around 40 and 55 on full load. I woke up this morning to find my machine which had been on all night had shut down and now fails to boot osx or xp. It just gets to the loading grey screen and I get kernel panic. Xp just gets caught in a boot loop and keeps going back to the bios. So I repaired permissions, tried a spare backup HDD of my osx86 drive, safe booted, stripped all components out of the computer one by one. Nothing worked. I still have my e2160 so I popped that in and it managed to boot... Sort of. but I ran into the same graphics issue I had when I swapped in the q6600. So that seems to work. I'm fine with keeping the e2160 if my processor is the problem, but how do I know for sure that its the processor? Could it be a mb issue still? If the processor is fried then should it even be able to post or boost? Are there any tests I can try? Do you think I'll be able to send this processor back?

[marliwahoo]

Try your overclock at 3gz. Mine is unstable above that.

[vaporATX]

I doubt the processor is fried. Sounds like mobo or memory issues. When you overclocked did you bump the NB or dimm voltages? Before we get into that do this: Put the Q6600 back in and pull everything else except video, the optical drive, and one memory module. Do a hard reset of the bios with the mobo jumper or short points. Does it post? If so, select the bios defaults and boot into a boot cd like Windows Ultimate Boot CD. Is it stable? Run prime95 for a while. Still stable? If not, pull the memory module, put in another one, and repeat. You could also use a memtest boot cd to do this, boots faster than WUBCD. If the memory checks out and you still have problems I'd suspect the mobo.

[pablo631]

ok I did all that. Memtest came up clean on the one stick I had in. I ran prime95 off of the ultimate boot cd. In fact i'm still running it now. It's been about an hour..how long should I run it? after I hard reset the bios I was able to boot XP in safe mode but crashed about 5 minutes in. Still no go on OS X at all though. Well if I'm looking at a new mobo. Should I stick with the ga-p35 or upgrade to something else?

[vaporATX]

ok I did all that. Memtest came up clean on the one stick I had in. I ran prime95 off of the ultimate boot cd. In fact i'm still running it now. It's been about an hour..how long should I run it? after I hard reset the bios I was able to boot XP in safe mode but crashed about 5 minutes in. Still no go on OS X at all though. Well if I'm looking at a new mobo. Should I stick with the ga-p35 or upgrade to something else?

 

Sounds like you mobo is probably ok. Prime would have crashed it if there was anything wrong. I'd be looking at the bios settings... something(s) aren't set right.

[pablo631]

I reset the mobo a few times to the fail safe settings & the optimized settings. Nothing. Now I can't even boot into XP safe mode. Are there any other test on the UBCD that can test the mobo or cpu? Should I place the e2160 in again and see if it runs normally for a few days? Thanks for all your help.

[vaporATX]

I reset the mobo a few times to the fail safe settings & the optimized settings. Nothing. Now I can't even boot into XP safe mode. Are there any other test on the UBCD that can test the mobo or cpu? Should I place the e2160 in again and see if it runs normally for a few days? Thanks for all your help.

 

Worth a try. As far as other tests... not really. memtest and prime are your best bets.

[groudon185p]

hmm it works fine on my system (except i have to boot from install disc and sound (need drivers) but...)

but then again i installed OS X AFTER i put the q6600 in so yeah dont know whats wrong (i totally rebuilt my system aswell basicly, new mobo new cpu i had an old amd athlon xp with only sse1!)

[pablo631]

So I ended up swapping my old E2160 back in. Everything booted up perfectly and has been running without any problems for about 12 hours. I'm thinking that the Q6600 processor may have been bad from the get go. I had a lot of issues just getting it to even run at all at first then when I did it crashed a lot. I did OC it, but well within its range. I think I'm going to send it back and try it again. Although this little E2160 OC to 3ghz does a nice job. I cant really even notice a difference unless I'm encoding or in Photoshop. So maybe I'll just see if I can get a refund.