I think I've posted about it here before. The machine will run fine for some period of time, then randomly freeze. When it does so, I can still move the arrow, but the machine is completely unresponsive (the clock stops) and I end up having to hard reboot.

So far, I've tried running EtreCheck (not really informative, it doesn't show the freezes as being KP's), running Disk Utility (says the drive is fine), can't run DW because the boot drive is an APFS-formatted SSD, and PRAM/PMU resets. None of these seem to have helped. I have backups of the drive, so there's no chance of losing any significant data. I've also tried booting from the AHT disk, but that doesn't seem to work any more (could be because I don't have the boot screen, because I have a Radeon RX580 in there.)

What I have done that might be informative -- left Console.app open, so that I could see what was going on when the machine froze. The problem there is that since the machine freezes, I couldn't take a screenshot, so instead I just snapped a couple photos with my iPhone. Not sure these will be at all informative, but here they are:

[imgur.com]

... I'm thinking that it might be some corrupted file, and the last option would be to reinstall the OS ... annoying, because it's been an intermittent problem, and having to reinstall this frequently is a pain. Part of me is thinking I might want to change the boot drive to HFS+, so that I'd be able to use DW.

Edit: I just discovered on running Disk Utility on the *container*, that the drive is giving overallocation warnings. I had no idea what these were, until I found this: [discussions.apple.com] ... this is seriously making me think that I should change the boot drive to HFS+ ...

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/15/2022 12:38PM by PeterB.

Did you put in a new PARM battery?

Does it have a Metal-capable graphics card? That is a requirement for running Monterey on the MacPro5,1.

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Article Accelerator
Does it have a Metal-capable graphics card? That is a requirement for running Monterey on the MacPro5,1.

Yes, the RX580 he mentioned is.

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AllGold

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Does it have a Metal-capable graphics card? That is a requirement for running Monterey on the MacPro5,1.

Yes, the RX580 he mentioned is.

Yes, and I'm not running Monterey.

PRAM battery -- I don't think it's necessarily new, but I'm pretty sure I checked the voltage, and it was fine.

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Does it have a Metal-capable graphics card? That is a requirement for running Monterey on the MacPro5,1.

He's running Mojave. Monterey is not compatible with a MP 5,1 anyway.
See if your Mac can run macOS Monterey

I'd check the cMP's firmware and verify it's at least up to v144.xxx...

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Does it have a Metal-capable graphics card? That is a requirement for running Monterey on the MacPro5,1.

He's running Mojave. Monterey is not compatible with a MP 5,1 anyway.
See if your Mac can run macOS Monterey

I'd check the cMP's firmware and verify it's at least up to v144.xxx...

Yup about the firmware. That's one of the first things I did, before adding the RX580 and going to Mojave.

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Yes, I meant Mojave.

Regarding the RX 580, Apple apparently states that it "might" be Metal-compatible: [www.macrumors.com]

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Yes, I meant Mojave.

Regarding the RX 580, Apple apparently states that it "might" be Metal-compatible: [www.macrumors.com]

Apple says that it IS Metal-compatible: [support.apple.com]

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If it's not detected as a panic, it's probably not a panic. But there may still be a relevant log. Visit the /Library/Logs folder and poke through the files/folders in there for indications of crashes/hangs with timing coincidental to the events you're experiencing.

If the cursor is moving, it's probably not a hard crash. Based on your description, I suspect a "hang." Odds are that it's a background task that's doing it. I've seen similar hangs caused by 3d party device-drivers, but it could be almost any process at fault. Etrecheck should have provided a report on Extensions, Launch Agents and Daemons. See if there's cruft from old software that you don't use anymore that you can remove.

...I use the blinking colon on the system clock as a way to judge the difference between a hang and a crash. If you enable the "flash the time separators" option in the Date & Time settings, I suspect that they'll flash even though the clock doesn't seem to update.

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