Mac Pro Dual Monitor Problem

I have a MacPro 4,1 with an ATI Radeon HD 5770 video card. I'm running OS X 10.6.8. I have an Apple 20" Monitor and a Hannspree 23" monitor. The problem I have is that when the computer goes into standby mode, 2 times out of 5 it will come back up with the primary monitor switched from the Apple to the Hannspree. I then have to go into the Display Preferences and switch the monitor arrangement, and the menu bar. Not a huge problem I grant you, but one that is vexing me nonetheless.
Also on an occasion...perhaps 1 time out of 25 the Apple monitor has a case of the jaggies, and is only fixable by shutting down the whole computer and restarting. This is really bad, considering it reminds me of when I get migrane headaches and my vision is constricted. It almost makes me nautious.

Apple's has three, 2xMDP + DVI
https://support.apple.com/kb/TS3477

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I've got a Mac Pro Dual Quad Core won't boot OS/X, but plays fine with Linux/Windows. I've tried all of the following initial tests as suggested on forums:
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Regards,
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Someone here once thought they knew EFI and Open Firmware a little, and used some commands from OF library that an Intel EFI Apple system didn't like. New logicboard.
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Most of the things you tried are what are more common with PC hardware. Including where people have tried and failed to install OS X on unsupported hardware.
I suppose it is possible something tried and failed to modify the Mac's firmware.
If you have Windows running, and you have WD drives, WD just posted new Lifeguard utility which is what I use to do a good job of stripping a drive down and recertify it for reuse, works wonders. Maybe same for other makes with vendor utility.

Premier pro play back screen goes black a freezes every 15 minute . This is my second mac pro with identical problems.

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SOLVED!!!!!
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Thanks, Grant.
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Make a "Genius" appointment at an Apple Store to have the machine tested.
Back up all data on the internal drive(s) before you hand over your computer to anyone. If privacy is a concern, erase the data partition(s) with the option to write zeros* (do this only if you have at least two complete, independent backups, and you know how to restore to an empty drive from any of them.) Don’t erase the recovery partition, if present.
Keeping your confidential data secure during hardware repair
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Hey gang,
I seemed to have entered a perfect storm here:
I had purchased the *MobileSTOR MS2UT 2 Bay SATA to eSATA/USB 2.0 RAID 0/1* Enclosure initially for a *dual 800 quicksilver G4* mac that I had, looking for a hardware-based Raid solution for back ups and to not burden the G4 processor. I have replaced the G4 with an early *2008 2.8 dual quad core mac pro*. After two machines and two different PCI sata cards, I've had no luck....
(website for the above enclosure)
http://www.sansdigital.com/mobilestor/ms2ut.html
For starters, in the G4, I had a quality Seritek/1ve2+2 controller that had no problem with two other single drive enclosures, but failed with the MS2UT.
http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-1ve2plus2/
A glib response from Seritek support says that I should use their enclosure. Digging around I find that I need a controller card that can handle a port multiplier enclosure rather than just any serial ata enclosure. Seems silly to me that the user has to dig for this. I mean the USB & FIREWIRE interfaces don't seem to care: it says USB/FIREWIRE on the effing box of both the controller and on the drive, badda-bing, badda boom: it works. Whats with this high maintenance of esata. Well you get roughly 2-3x the performance so Ok, maybe its worth it.
Well, with the macpro on the horizon,, I give up on the G4, close that unsolved mystery. For the mac pro I figure PCIe, a modern computer, no problem. I get the computer, fish around the internet for an esata PCIe card, then I come across this review of the WiebeTech SilverSATA II which appears to be similar to that of the MobileSTOR:
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/wiebetech/silver2/
It appears that the unit has specific tastes as far as having the right card to make it bootable, multiport aware, etc... (the Sonnet Tempo 4+4 card works but its a PCIx card, not PCIe)
Like I said: install a bootable Mac OS on any USB/firewire drive, plug it into any card, and it works... estata... its russian roulette...
Ok so I round up some vendors, (firmtek, sonnet, Highpoint) send them emails to see what they think: if their latest cards will work with the MS2UT... They are all over the place.. they think it may work, they dunno... it should work, they haven't tested it... then they try to push their own enclosure hardware on me. I mean see an astrologist or have your palm read.. it seems more likely you'll get a more accurate answer from them, rather than vendors... props to Sonnet, though, they list compatibility right on the page with their controller.
then 10.6 comes out... and you email vendors about compatibility on that OS, and they don't even email you back.
So I find this review of the highpoint rocket raid for the mac on the great sight: Barefeats.com
http://www.barefeats.com/hard119.html
to make a long story short:
+KEY FEATURES of the "eSATA for Mac"+
+1. Dual eSATA ports+
+2. 32 and 64-bit EFI onboard+
+3. Able to boot Mac OS X+
+4. Plug and Play for (Oxford and Silicon Image chipset) external storage+
enclosures
+5. 4x PCIe rating+
+6. Support for Direct Attached and Port Multiplied enclosures+
+7. RAID 0, 1, 5, and JBOD support using browser-based manager+
+8. Native support for Snow Leopard+
+9. Compatible with 2006 - 2009 Mac Pro+
I should be set, right? WRONG!
I email highpoint, detailing that I planned to mix both Port multiplied (PM) and direct access (DA) enclosures on the same card at the same time. They say maybe (only describing the PM enclosure, not even mentioning the DA enclosure compatibility as I specified), since its a raid card and I intended to use it with an enclosure with its own raid hardware, however they say they see no issues. Well it shows they don't even know their own hardware: Their docks say that the card supports PM enclosures as well as DA (direct access) enclosures. Their web based software even shows the two as separate categories. What is buried in the manual and not cleared up by tech support or their product page is that YOU CAN'T MIX PM AND DA ENCLOSURES ON THE CARD AT THE SAME TIME!!! I explained more in the paragraph above than any tech support from any company. Unbelievable where support has gone these days.
I discover the above because I found the card at Fry's believe it not and since they have a generous return policy I tried it out and learned the above the hard way. No dice on the MS2UT with what is perhaps the most forgiving esata card for the mac.
So more hunting on the web, this time the enclosure's manufacture site: sans digital.
http://www.sansdigital.com/mobilestor/ms2ut.html
...clicking on the accessories tab I find several esata adapter cards... funny that they include ones that don't appear to support PM enclosures... Anyway, I study two that state they supports port multipliers:
http://www.sansdigital.com/adapters/ha-san-4espcix2.html:
http://www.sansdigital.com/adapters/ha-dat-4espcie.html
Ok, I may not get a bootable enclosure.. I just want to get this thing working in esata since cloning my internal raid on the mac pro takes 8 hours using usb, and my main purpose is to maintain a clone so I make my compromise.
I should be set, right? WRONG!
reading the fine print on both cards it says:
*(Please note that the host adapter card is based on Silicon Image chipset, which currently only support up to MAC OS 10.5.1 by Silicon Image.)*
I do more research, it seems any manufacturer using chips by Silicon Image will have an issue with 10.6 macs! On some websites it says Silicon Image will never release a driver. On firmtek it says they make their own driver and swears that it works. At the Silicon Image website they say they are an OEM provider so don't bother them, and that its up to the vendor to make a compatible driver. Sheesh!!
I don't get it.. whats the point in having an esata sticker if it appears to come in more flavors than an ice cream shop!
Oh and it gets better: I go to the sonnet site, thinking they have to have something that works, looking at their latest tempo SATA E4P:
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/temposatae4p.html
well, the fine print is EXHAUSTIVE, but again props to Sonnet for making it crystal clear:
(4) Sonnet Tempo cards are compatible with most external SATA storage. However, external hard drives with USB 2.0/eSATA dual interface based on the Oxford Semiconductor OXU931DS storage controller chip may not be compatible with Mac OS X when connected via SATA. Known issues are kernel panics occurring when the drive is connected, or the drive not being recognized by the operating system.
+Summary of external SATA storage+
+• Storage with eSATA alone +
Compatible
+• Storage with triple interfaces +
Compatible
+• Storage with eSATA plus Firewire 400 and/or 800 +
Compatible
+• Storage with port multiplier support (multiple drives) +
Compatible
+• Storage with RAID 0, 1, or 5 (multiple drives) +
Compatible
+• Storage with eSATA plus USB (based on JMicron 20366) +
Compatible
+ these compatible drives include, but are not limited to:+
+- OWC Mercury On-the-Go USB 2.0/eSATA 2.5" portable+
+• Storage with eSATA plus USB (based on Oxford OXU931DS) +
+not compatible+
+ these incompatible drives include, but are not limited to:+
+- Western Digital My Book™ Premium ES Edition™+
+- Seagate Technology FreeAgent™ Pro+
+Advanced users note that this card is not yet compatible in full 64-bit boot. Snow Leopard default boots in 32-bit mode, except in an Xserve.+
So in short: if you have an enclosure that has both USB and esata, but does not use the JMicron 20366, then it will not be recognized by the card. If you have an enclosure with three interfaes: USB, FW and esata, you're fine. Keep in mind too: most manufacturers don't put the source manufacturer of their chipsets on the box. So I ask..
*HOW IS THE CONSUMER SUPPOSED TO KNOW!*
I swear, a perfect analogy is if I go to best buy, buy a toshiba DVD player only to discover it doesn't play DVD's that contain movies produced by Sony Pictures..because its not a a Sony/columbia House movie. You think consumers would put up with that crap? UNBELIEVABLE...
So now I have this really versatile enclosure that apparently can't run on Mac 10.6 with ANY esata controller for the mac. I really like the design of the enclosure, with its hardware based raid that is hot swappable and has a small footprint. However there seems to be no way to get a controller card for this device that will work on a 10.6 mac.
I guess whats inferred is that you should get an enclosure with the fewest variety of ports, i.e. esata/fw/usb... ironically if it has all three, you are ok, but not if it has usb/esata. Being that USB is the most popular, thats not easy. I'm looking to contact Sans Digital to see if they will exchange it for me, possible for a model with esata/fw800 or an esata only model, if it exists. My last resort is to just use it as a USB drive (my intention was to use it as a clone of my system, with the added security that the enclosure makes a copy of a copy in raid 1), however its like 3x as time consuming than esata.
If anyone has a working MobileSTOR MS2UT/wiebetech SilverSATA II in a 10.5 mac pro, please respond to me with your config. Thanks for reading!

Thank you hatter for your reply.
I'm familiar with OWC, as I've done business with them since 2001, as well as XLR8.
I have a 2008 mac pro so the 2009 model related problems are not an issue in my situation
As I stated above I go to reputable vendors for my hardware who have specific mac experience. I look specifically for hardened compatibility so that there is support for things like deep sleep. The Sans Digital enclosure was over $200..it was not cheap. The USB/Esata combo is the most common interface for the enclosure storage market. Having a compatibility issue is a vendor fault, not the buyer. Having minutiae flavors of esata compatability based on chipsets roulette wheel is inexcusable. The enclosure needs that I have is for the medium to be removable and be able to be rebuilt at the hardware level, i.e. at the enclosure's control panel. To the mac its just a drive. The hotswap and back up is transparent to the OS and mac hardware, and allows me to change from raid 0/1 and do back up right from the enclosure interface.
So far I haven't had problems with USB/Firewire. Meanwhile Esata to me has been nothing but beta testing for vendors and seeing how the chipset manufacturers have gone loosey-goosey on following spec and just dump cheap chinese crap into the market with no pride.
for comparison:
USB/FW, PATA, SATA, SCSI
1) industry standard
2) native drivers
3) bootable. Period.
4) buy a controller card/raid card, plug it in, format, it works even through major OS upgrades.
5) USB/FW: Hot-swapable. Yes it really does work.
Esata:
1) Multiple standards (again, look at the Sonnet website to see the minefield one has to walk through to mate a controller card to an enclosure)
2) non native drivers. Buying an esata card is like marrying into the vendors family. Plus if you manage to get things working and do an OS upgrade, you are playing russian roulette. If you system boots off it, then get life insurance because you may kill yourself.
3)Not bootable and no one seems to care to explain why. Whats odd is that some earlier PCIx cards were bootable (like sonnet Temp 4x4) but their PCIe successors aren't. Not sure if this has to do with the host computer BIOS and/or the current chipsets from SI which rely on custom drivers from the vendors. Another lovely example of this are the ODD_SATA ports on the Mac pro: storage only, not bootable. Sure it makes sense now that I've learned it the hard way, however to users of FW/USB and even IDE, one would think that motherboard ports are bootable. Yes I know this is a mac bios thing and its not even considered as part of the feature set of the computer
4) As I've shown, each controller card seems to be unique, even if its from the same vendor. Even the drivers vary from card to card! Heck even the vendors are unsure as to how compatible their controller cards are with various enclosures. That is proprietary, not industry standard. OS upgrades doesn't seem to provide native driver support for Direct access and/or port multiplying interfaces. The problem with this is that film/video users like myself like to build bullet proof systems, and with raids that I've built from IDE, FW, or USB, I've never had the minutiae of compatibility issues as I've had with esata. I installed an Acard raid controller in my dual 800 back in 2001, installed the drives and forgot about it. it just worked through multiple OS upgrades. Not sure whats gong on with esata.
5) Can't call it hot swappable if I can't get the **** thing to wok in the first place.
My analysis is this: Esata is basically a proprietary format to the vendor that sells the hardware, while USB/FW is an industry standard. I bought a quality enclosure that said "esata", I bought a quality controller that said "esata", it didn't work. I had to learn the hard way about DA and PM enclosures and now about chipset conflicts. I've built computers since the late 80's amiga days, hot-rodding that computer well beyond spec and with custom cooling. SCSI terminators and IDE master/slave issues were easy-cheesey because they followed straightforward rules. This esata stuff is just plain sloppy work on the part of vendors and as Danny Glover said I'm getting to old for this **** as far as being a beta tester for hardware.

Is my Mac Pro eating monitors? Am I going crazy? A great mystery....

Something very bizarre is happening, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Maybe someone here can offer a theory. Here's my setup, and here's what's been happening....
Mac Pro (early 2009), 2.66 GHz Quad-Core, 8 gigs of RAM, running Mac OS X 10.5.7.
ATI Radeon HD 4870. A very nice system, still has that new Mac smell.
Primary display is a 24" HannsG HH251 (a nice, if inexpensive large flat-panel).
Secondary display is a 20" Viewsonic VP200s. This is an older flat-panel (about 4 years old). I own three of these Viewsonic displays - they were a good primary workhorse monitor in their day, now I use them (mostly) as the 2nd monitor on my Macs and PCs (I have several).
Here's what's been happening...
The primary display is fine. The secondary display has been "failing". When I first hooked up the Viewsonic monitor (as the second display), it was fine. We'll call this "Viewsonic #1". After a couple of months, though, it started flickering - not a subtle flicker (as you might see with a low refresh rate), but a complete, violent flicker where the screen redraws instantly. At first, the big flicker would only occur intermittently - once every few minutes - but eventually it would start happening more and more frequently, then happened every second or two, then became constant - to the point where stuff on that monitor became completely unusable - I couldn't see the cursor clearly, couldn't close windows, etc. Initially, if I turned the monitor off for a moment, then back on, it would come back briefly. But the big flicker would start again soon. Powering down the computer and leaving it off for a while (like overnight), then starting it up again, the 2nd display (Viewsonic #1) would be OK for a while, but eventually the flashing started again. Rinse, lather, repeat.
I figured some hardware component was going bad - probably the monitor, but I was hoping it might be the cable or perhaps even the video card (still under warrantee). So I did a little swapping to see: I used a different video cable. Same problem. I thought, "****, the display is toast." I was bummed, but not heartbroken: I had 2 more of these monitors, and I could swap another one in. So I pulled an identical monitor from an older Windows PC that I'm not using much (we'll call this Viewsonic #2), and swapped that. As I suspected, using Viewsonic #2, the 2nd display on the Mac Pro came up nice and flicker-free, rock-steady and looking good. And when I boot up the Windows PC that now has the "bad" display (Viewsonic #1, removed from the Mac Pro), sure enough, it's flickering and flashing and just about impossible to use.
OK, so this seemed to confirm my theory: that Viewsonic #1 was simply in the process of dying. No hardware lasts forever, and although I'm used to getting 5-10 years out of my monitors (really - I've been at this a long time), that rule of thumb is from CRT days - I figured maybe flat panel LCDs only go about 5 years. I shrugged and made my peace with it. Since I was back in 2-monitor heaven, I wasn't worried about it (since I don't need to use the Windows PC with the funky display).
Turns out, there's more to it. This is where it gets strange.
It was about 3 or 4 days ago that I did the monitor swap. Since then, Viewsonic #2 has been fine, as I expected, solid, looking good. But about 6 hours ago, I was shocked to see Viewsonic #2 - now hooked up as my secondary display on the Mac Pro - has just started the same flicker. And it started getting worse, pretty quickly. Within an hour or so, it was becoming unusable. Once again, turning it off helped - a little - and so did shutting done the Mac and leaving it off. But soon after powering it up, it starts going haywire again. It's got the exact same problem that killed the other monitor.
I am thinking that the odds of two different monitors failing (hardware going bad) like this is extremely unlikely. I know it's not the cable or plug, because when I moved Viewsonic #1 to a different computer, it's still broken. I don't think it's the video card, because the "badness" moves with the bad monitor, and the primary display is fine.
The only think that makes any sense (and I'll admit it doesn't make much), is that there's something about this Mac Pro that is causing the 2nd monitor to fail - actually damaging the monitor. That sounds pretty unlikely, but it's the least unlikely think I can think of. Could it be outputting a signal that kills the monitor hardware? I know that sounds crazy....I'm open to suggestions if anyone has another theory.
I've never heard of a computer (or a video card) causing a display to fail, but given the fact that these monitors were both fine before I hooked them up to this Mac, and that both of them seem to have gone belly-up now (and they stay broken if moved back to another computer) really leaves me scratching my head.
What on earth is happening here? Any ideas?

Hi Ltm,
Is your set up is like this? Main monitor attached to dvi port on 4870, other displays attached to the mini port via adapter?
If it is, those mini ports have been the source of many peoples problems here. Maybe not even so much the ports but the adapters. Some seem to work better than others. I bought two in the 20 dollar range from Apple and they both worked poorly (and I have all Apple displays!). Apparently Apple sells one for about 100 bucks that works the best, but I changed cards before buying that.
OWC has an interesting mini-display port connecter now that looks good but also goes for a hundred or so.
But what is precisely going on with your Viewsonics to seemingly destroy them, I don't know. I've read of similar problems to yours, but the displays never stayed in a poor condition after the problem was found. Yours is the first post I've read of displays being actually killed off.
If you could take the now damaged display and one that isn't to an Apple store to try on one of their Macs, maybe they could turn up something for you, an incompatibility somewhere maybe. But it's a pretty bizarre situation made worse by Apples decision to introduce unnecessary variables by going with that mini-display port.

Mac Pro: 2nd Display Problem

Hello,
I have been having a lot of trouble with a Mac Pro and separate displays. First, it took me quite a bit of playing around to get it to recognize the first display plugged directly into the DVI port. I then went to add a second monitor through a mini display port to DVI adapter, and I cannot get the Mac Pro to recognize the monitor. Nothing shows up in display to suggest that the other monitor is there. Clicking on Detect Displays does nothing. Thinking it could potentially be a bad video card. I am also sure that the adapter, cable, and monitor are not faulty.
Thanks!

The video card is an Nvidia GeForce GT 120 512MB RAM. It is a Mac Pro 4,1. I have double checked every connected and I know nothing is loose. Also, when changing out trying to change monitors in hopes that it would be detected, the Mac shut down because of a problem. All of this keeps leading me to a bad video card.

Mac Pro Dual Monitor Problem

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