Yosemite Install Not Working!!

[The Jeep]

Hi - any help with this frustrating problem will be much appreciated. Here's what's up:

I have a 2010 Mac Pro (Model 5,1) 2.8GHz Quad-core Xeon with 10GB RAM and OSX 10.8.5 (Mountain Lion) installed in my 1TB primary drive in Slot 1 of the machine. I want to upgrade to Yosemite on a newly purchased 2TB drive (all Western Digital Caviar drives).

I have downloaded the Yosemite OSX from App Store and run the application which then allows me to choose my destination drive for OSX 10.10 (in my case my new 2TB drive). The computer then restarts… and restarts… and restarts….. I've let this go on for at least 12 times and I'm sure this can't be right, even though an earlier message suggests that more than one restart may be necessary.

I've tried everything I can think of such as re-erasing my new drive, repairing disk permissions on my start-up drive, re-downloading the Yosemite App, but still get the same result. I can't find any comments online about the process needing, say, 20 restarts - this would seem highly unlikely anyway.

So what can the problem be? I've checked that the Yosemite upgrade is compatible with my current OSX and my computer - there should be no problem there.

Am I trying to do the wrong thing by attempting a 'Clean Install' of Yosemite on a brand new drive? Is this not what this particular download is for? Is it only an upgrade? I don't think so, but perhaps I am mistaken.

Very frustrating - someone must have the answer!

Cheers, John.

 

[chas_m]

From what you've provided I can't think of any problem that would preclude this working. Since you say that this is a new 2TB model, have you formatted it with Disk Utility?

 

[The Jeep]

Aha, fixed it!

I removed my 8GB of additional memory and my 'obsolete' TC Powercore card and it worked!

It just didn't like rebooting with one or either of these items installed.

Thanks

 

[chas_m]

Huzzah! Good detective work there!

 

[The Jeep]

I remembered having issues with memory sticks when working on my old PCs.... oh well, at least the thread is out there in case anyone else has the same issue

 

[Slydude]

Nice work.

Any idea which of the two might be causing the problem? My bet would be one of the memory chips but that would require testing using something other than the Apple Hardware Test. Some memory errors get past it but not past tother tests.Lasdt time I needed to do this I used an earlier version of Memtest OS X

 

[johnodd4]

Mac pro's are most definitely known for weird installation issues.

Even Bootcamp had issues once.

 

[Slydude]

Mac pro's are most definitely known for weird installation issues.

What are you basing this on? I've owned 8 or 9 different variations of Macs over the years. I've never found the Mac Pro to be more prone to weird installation issues than any other Mac I've owned.

In The Jeep's case he seems to have narrowed things down to either memory chips or a third party card as the likely culprits of the problems. How is that indicative of the Mac Pro being more of a problem than other models.

 

[johnodd4]

The mac pro 1.1 wouldn't install windows via bootcamp unless you unplugged the mac hard drive first it would always display the error of efi not found on drive error during installation.

the other errors included the white screen of death when trying to install windows or linux.

 

[The Jeep]

Hi guys, I wonder if I could deflect your attention to my current thread about my locked hard drive. I've had no responses yet and it's disappearing down the page! Cheers

 

[chscag]

Tagging that on to this thread is not good forum etiquette. If your other thread is moving down off screen, then bump it. In other words, reply to your own thread to bring it back to the top. ;D

 

[The Jeep]

Thanks for the tip chscag

I seem to have that issue sorted now.