[passmaster16]

My 3 year old Mac Pro is suddenly having problems with bootup. It gets past the spinning gear and apple logo but ends up at a white screen and spinning beach ball. I can move the cursor around the screen. OS is still 10.6. I'm able to successfully boot via safe mode. So I went in and tried to disable the login items for the account, deleted the fonts folder, and repaired disk permissions but nothing helped. I'm wondering if it's a corrupt kernal extension or plist but how would I know? I'd rather not wipe the machine completely at this point. Any ideas?

[reader50]

Boot in Verbose mode so you can see where it hangs. Hold down command-v during startup until text appears.

[passmaster16]

Didn't really see much on the verbose output. I'm thinking the video card is bad because its giving a white screen when attempting to boot from the snow leopard dvd. I'm assuming safe mode disables some of the video capability which is why it may work there while not working from the dvd or normal boot. I actually found the screen saver locked up on the machine yesterday with a bunch of lines in the video. Perhaps the video acceleration portion of the card is smoked?

[reader50]

Put your original install DVD in the drive - the disc that came with your Mac Pro. Hold down Option while booting, to bring up the boot selector. You'll see an extra partition on the optical drive, which contains the Apple Hardware Tests. Select that, and let the test run. Let us know the result.

If you get the same symptoms while booting from another source (DVD), then there is probably a hardware issue. Perhaps the video card as you suspect, but it could just as easily be something else.

[Waragainstsleep]

I would take it as a good excuse to put another drive in it, install a clean OS then either try migrating to see if it works out the kink, or just copy over what you need from the old one before re-purposing it as extra storage.