Unable to boot into Recovery

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I have a Mac Pro 1,1, with 2 Xeon 3.0 ghz processors.

On a recent power up, it gave me the dreaded blinking folder with question mark. However, none of the typical methods of dealing with this have worked. Cmd + R does nothing, cannot connect to internet so Shift is useless, and holding Option after chime brings up the HDD and Recovery partition, but when I click to choose eirher, the icons disappear and the computer hangs up. I tried with a bootable USB with identical results. I’ve reset PRAM and SMC with no fix. I even tried an entirely different logic board in the system with the same results.

Does this indicate a problem in another component? Could a faulty PSU do this? What other internal components could cause this error?

Any help is greatly appreciated.
 

chscag

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Welcome to our forums.

Does this indicate a problem in another component? Could a faulty PSU do this? What other internal components could cause this error?

Probably not the PS although they have been known to fail or get weak in a Mac Pro that old. My guess is your graphics card is acting up. Do you have another that you can swap out? Also try swapping out the hard drive first.
 
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By chance is it running Snow Leopard OS X.6 as Recovery was not available o0n the old operating system?
 
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Thanks. Tried different HDD, no luck. The graphics card is almost brand new, so I’d hate to think it’s that, but I’ll try to hunt down one I can try.

What’s the likelihood of the cable connecting the HDD’s to the logic card being faulty? I’ve noticed that when I hold option, my bootable USB comes up immediately, but it takes quite some time for the HDD to show up. Of, as I said, clicking on either just makes the computer hang up.
 
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Trying again. I was running Yosemite on this machine. There is a recovery partition on the drive. If I have my normal bootable HDD and my bootable USB plugged in, and I hold the option key after the chime, three options come up: the USB first, then much later the Mac install on the HDD and the Recovery partition on the same HDD. However, no matter which I choose, the systems goes to a white screen and hangs up. It never boots into recover. I've tried a brand new HDD with the bootable USB and it hangs up just the same.

This would seem to indicate a hardware problem. As it does the same things on two different Logic Boards, I would assume the problem lays elsewhere, but am out of ideas as to what I should try next.

I have tried a different graphics card with no luck. Any other suggestions would be terrific.

Thanks.
 

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