Why did my Mac Pro crash on Mountain Lion?

Question

Hi there,
My Mac Pro crashed twice yesterday.  No logs were created in ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/ for those as far as I can tell (nothing with the 28th as a date).  The computer just turned itsself off, and restarted.
I repaired the boot drive by launching from a Snow Leopard disk.  I ran Techtool diagnostic tests yesterday on the computer and everything passed (I skipped the boot drive surface scan, and only the 4 internal drives were connected. 
Today, it turned off again, there was a grey screen I'd never seen before telling me that my mac would restart because of a problem, and boy, it did.  It wasn't the typical 'kernel panic screen' I saw rarely in the past.  This happened at 3:30 pm my time.  There's an "AvidBinIndexer crash log that is timed at 9:22 am, but none at 3:30 pm.  (Note that I've never looked in the diagnostic reports directory so I may not know what I'm looking at).
According to the files in the Diagnostic reports directory I've had crash logs since the 13th for Adobe, Avid, File Syncrhonization, qmaster, and Soundsource (for a total of 19 files in that directory, nothing before the 13th)
Now some background:
I run a Mac Pro 3,1 with 12 gigs of ram, an eSata card, ATI 5770 graphics card.
I have 4 internal and 6-7 external drives attached (4 esata, 1 firewire), 1-2 usb.
I upgraded to Mountain Lion on Jan 24 from Lion, however, this problem occured a few times before.
I had a USB backup drive that had volume problems, that I had to backup / reformat / repair, and so my first suspicion was that it was to blame.  But no, today it rebooted and that drive wasn't connected.  All other drives were however, and on.  It occured just after I woke the computer from sleep.
Any ideas on what's up?  What can I post here that could help someone diagnose this?  Any things to try to further narrow down the issue?
Thanks!
Rick

Answer 1

what a long post....Apple, btw, does not read this stuff, so ranting, raving, and complaining here might make you feel good, but it does no good at all. That being said, I, too have a Mac Pro Quad Core Xeon with 6 gigs of ram and an nVidia 8800 GT graphics card (not as good as yours, alas) and I've had no problems at all with it. Yes, it doesn't have Thunderbolt, but maybe we Mac pro owners will get lucky and someone will come out with an adapter (probably not). No, you probably don't have to throw away your Mac Pro, but if you do, I'll take it, for a small "recycling" fee >:-) That was a joke.  Yes, the Mac Pro's future isn't quite clear, YET. Hopefully that will improve very soon. As for not being able to upgrade to Mountain Lion. Don't worry about that too much, Nobody is forcing you to do that.  Your Mac Pro won't quit working if it isn't installed. From what  I've heard, you should give the new OS a chance, and wait to get it, in case there might be some bugs, or stuff not working with the new OS, which has been known to happen. Yes, we Mac Pro owners don't like being treated like mushrooms-kept in the dark, and being fed......... but Apple is Apple and it will do what it does, and there is nothing you or me can really do to change that. All I can say is....trust, have faith, be patient, go for a walk, do something else to take your mind off of this problem. IF apple decides to drop the Mac Pro for good, and that's a big "IF", I think they will anger a whole bunch of people
which isn't good. However, that hasn't happened...YET. Let us hope that it doesn't
John B