Mac Pro won't boot with Magma PE6R4 connected

[Straight Shooter]

My Mac Pro won't boot with the Magma PE6R4 connected (2 cable version). When I disconnect one of the infiniband cables connected to the Mac Pro it will boot. I have had this happen twice before (about a year ago) when I was booting into lion 10.7.4 from Tiger 10.4.11. Resetting PRAM allowed the mac pro to boot with the Magma connected. Now approx. a year later this happened again but this time resetting PRAM and SMC did not work and the Mac Pro will not boot with the Magma chassis connected. The Magma host card in the Mac Pro and the PCI cards in the magma are not showing up in the system profiler.

Any ideas on what may be causing this ?
Possible bad power supply ?
Has anyone had the host card or internal board go bad in the Magma PE6R4 ?

[Chief Technician]

If you hold Command+V during startup, you will invoke verbose mode. You should see a bunch of text that shows what is going on during the startup process. Do you see any clues in that text as to what the problem might be?

[Straight Shooter]

I did the hold Command+V during startup and nothing stood out.
Screen text was only up for a few seconds so I could not read much each time
I held Command+V during startup.

[Straight Shooter]

I tried the Command+V during startup again. This line came up just after
(PCI configuration begin) ...

- Pthread support ABORTS when sync kernel primitives misused -

No idea if this has any relevance to the boot issue ?

[Chief Technician]

I don't know if that message is relevant. If you hold the shift key during startup (safe boot), does the Mac startup successfully? You wouldn't be able to use the cards in the chassis, though this would establish if a driver is causing your problem.

[Straight Shooter]

Mac Pro will safe boot successfully without Magma connected,
but will not safe boot if chassis is connected.

A little more information....I just spoke with the engineer who this happened to on this mac in our studio.
The mac (with chassis connected and working fine on tiger-PTHD7.4) was shut down with tiger harddrive.
Next day before booting up this mac he pulled the tiger drive out of the mac and put in another harddrive
with Snow leopard os-PTHD8. He tried to safe boot with the snow leopard drive with magma connected and mac would not safe boot.
When this happened to me previously on this same mac I was running tiger and then tried to restart from a partition with lion os with the chassis connected ( drive was partitioned with tiger and lion on same drive)

[Chief Technician]

Originally Posted by Straight Shooter

Mac Pro will safe boot successfully without Magma connected,
but will not safe boot if chassis is connected.

Something about that chassis when used with Lion OS must be causing your problem. I don't use chassis and don't have any other suggestions here.

[John_Toolbox]

The symptom of bad PS on the older chassis was similar. One other quirk with the older magmas was the power button did not respond if the PS was bad, the chassis would just stay on with the fans spinning all the time.

The older magma chassis used a standard ATX power supply, not sure what the PE6R4 uses, but it's worth checking into.

[Straight Shooter]

I removed all cards from the chassis, powered up the chassis and 192.
When I applied power to the mac it booted up immediately (in tiger) without me pushing the power button on the mac. Magma then shows up in system profiler. Placed all the cards back in the chassis and all is working fine.
I believe the issue is with the rev version of some of the cards not being compatible with Lion. The core card and 2 process cards are from a system I purchased in 2003 and the accel cards may also be an incompatible rev version where Lion is concerned.
This issue previously happened to me when I chose Lion as the startup disk while I was booted in tiger with the chassis connected and on.
Another odd thing is I was installing some plugins on this system (tiger PT7.4) about a year ago and when I went to restart the mac it booted into lion instead of staying on tiger.
Anyway I will be removing lion from this partitioned drive and will not boot into Lion with the Magma on or connected.

Thanks for your responses Jonathan and John.

Best,
Craig