06/07 Mac Pro (1,1/2,1) and OS X El Capitan

[MacVidCards]

Make sure it is either a real Apple card or previously flashed. If he was using without bootscreens as a PC Card you will need this info.

Flashing of such a card can be done in 10.7.5 but is not easy.

 

[HAL2010]

Just do it from the command prompt in Windows. It's not rocket science.

 

[Bruce L]

Thank you MacVidCards. My friend says he has two cards. One that was in his 2008 Mac Pro and one that was purchased new because he thought his original video card was going out. He purchased a new video card at that time. As it turned out it was his monitor that failed. He initially tried his monitor on his wife's computer and it worked just fine. Then the monitor on his wife's computer literally started smoking and died. He loaned his monitor to his wife while she was waiting for her new monitor. When he moved his monitor back to his computer it lasted a few days then went black. Since both monitors were purchased at the same time from the same merchant one for his Mac Pro and one for his wife's Mac Mini he thinks they were part of a bad batch. Anyway I told him I would buy the new one from him which has been sitting around his house for a few of years now. He offered to sell it for what I thought was fair price and to throw in the used card as a backup. I figured that would be the safest course of action. So to answer your question it is a real Apple card but has not been flashed. Hopefully I can use it for awhile before getting it flashed.

Make sure it is either a real Apple card or previously flashed. If he was using without bootscreens as a PC Card you will need this info.

Flashing of such a card can be done in 10.7.5 but is not easy.

 

[Bruce L]

Since I don't own a computer running Windows I will have to wait until my son comes home from college and use his computer if I don't have MacVidCards flash it for me or try to do it on my Mac. I am a little concerned about flashing this card myself because I think that if I screw up flashing the card I can 'brick' my card.

Just do it from the command prompt in Windows. It's not rocket science.

 

[MacVidCards]

The reason I said it needs to be real Apple card or previously flashed is that any Nvidia cards don't have right size EEPROM chip on them. SO an 8800GT from a 3,1 that had boot screens would mean it had right EEPROM already. And it can be done in OS 10.7.5 with some fiddling.

What was his 2nd card? If it was an AMD card you may be in luck. Those typically work in ALL Mac Pros. (EFI is universal)

 

[Bruce L]

MacVidCards I am not sure. The new one which was never even put in his Mac is an nVidia GeForce 8800GT with 512 MB PCI for Mac Pro with EFI 32. English is not his first language and he is always looking for a bargain not that these are related but sometimes he misses the details. I remember he ordered a part for his car and the year was off by one. He did not realize that things changed on his car in the subsequent year. So we had to return the part. Anyway this kind of hacking is all new to me. My first computer had DOS and a 15 MB hard disk that was mostly empty. I have run DOS, Windows, OS/2 and Linux. Never got far with Linux. I was pretty much a power user except with Linux. Then I got over my first Mac and as they say once you go Mac you never go back. Anyway I think if I understand from earlier in this post that having EFI 32 is good.

The reason I said it needs to be real Apple card or previously flashed is that any Nvidia cards don't have right size EEPROM chip on them. SO an 8800GT from a 3,1 that had boot screens would mean it had right EEPROM already. And it can be done in OS 10.7.5 with some fiddling.

What was his 2nd card? If it was an AMD card you may be in luck. Those typically work in ALL Mac Pros. (EFI is universal)

 

[MacVidCards]

If it has EFI32 he should not have seen a boot screen on a 3,1.

Good news is it should work OOTB for you.

 

[Bruce L]

MacVidCards thank you for that information. This has been a rough year for me since about March or April so this may be really good news for me. I really liked my old 2007 Mac Pro bought during better days. The only reason I retired it was that I really needed a machine that would run Mavericks. I ended up getting a late 2012 Mac Mini last October after Apple made the decision to solder the RAM to the motherboard, pull the Firewire 800 port and use a less capable processor in their new Mac Minis. I only wish I had discovered the excellent instructions in this forum about how to hack this Mac Pro before I bought the Mac Mini which I actually like a lot. Also I had 2 kernel panics yesterday when I was continuing to install programs on it. Hopefully this new card will take some load off of the processor and RAM so that I won't have those anymore.

 

[Casby]

Forgive my total noobery here. I'm usually pretty good with this stuff but there's sooooo much information to parse through.

I'm looking for help on essentially a fresh re-build of a Mac Pro 1,1. I just purchased a new bare HDD since the original one it had was dead. I am also going to be upgrading the MP a quite a bit, but I'm confused about the order of which I need to do things. Here's my other thread.
I currently have an iMac running El Capitan so I can slave/target disk the Mac Pro from the iMac to run whatever.

The Mac Pro is getting new: HDD, GFX Card, CPUs, and more RAM.

What order should I be doing everything in?

 

[Bruce L]

Casby in my humble opinion you came to the right place. The information in this forum is what enabled me to get El Capitan installed on my 2007 Mac Pro 2,1. The help I have gotten with my video issues has been great. As for installing El Cap on my 2,1 Mac Pro I started with the information provided by RX2904 on this page: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...os-x-el-capitan.1890435/page-24#post-22011624. I just followed the directions and El Cap installed with any problems except for deleting the existing boot.efi file. Having said that this may have been an issue with the way I was installing it which I won't go into here. You can see my comment after installing El Cap on the next page of the thread.

I would encourage you to do the install as long as you have another computer and can go online and get advice if you have any problems which I hope that you don't.

 

[Bruce L]

Casey, one more thing here is where I downloaded the boot.efi file: http://piker-alpha.github.io/macosxbootloader/. I chose the prebuild (32-bit) version of boot.efi for El Capitan with a black background and white Apple logo which I prefer to the grey background. I would suggest making a donation to Piker-Alpha for his work on this.

 

[splifingate]

Forgive my total noobery here. I'm usually pretty good with this stuff but there's sooooo much information to parse through.

I'm looking for help on essentially a fresh re-build of a Mac Pro 1,1. I just purchased a new bare HDD since the original one it had was dead. I am also going to be upgrading the MP a quite a bit, but I'm confused about the order of which I need to do things. Here's my other thread.
I currently have an iMac running El Capitan so I can slave/target disk the Mac Pro from the iMac to run whatever.

The Mac Pro is getting new: HDD, GFX Card, CPUs, and more RAM.

What order should I be doing everything in?

Establish a running installation of whatever flavour of OSX that works--in the most stable manner, possible--for you.

I suggest Lion, as that's Stock (but costs $ (teh ++ of newer OSX releases is that they are distributed via teh interwebs, and you can get them ad-hoc, depending upon where you are, at the time (I started with teh Stock Leopard, and boosted all that I have from there), but you need teh App Store, which comes with 10.7.5, IIRC)) . . . I also suggest more than one HD: SSDs for primaries, and spinners for otré partitions, storage, &c.

Your efforts are as only as good as what you can put into what you desire to achieve.

I can go nowhere--hardware-wise--but to the addition of a more powerful GPU (which is wasted on the capacity to which I purpose this machine), and a BT 4.0 transceiver (which I plan to get from MVC, $/time, permitting)).

Man, but I #fsck'd-up teh CPU upgrade by monging the FGP pins on one CPU slot, and I spent a cupola' hours with some powerful LED's, a stone-teh-crows-at-home magnifying lens, and a fine-point teaser to re-position three pins back to (what I imagined was ) Factory . . . two matched x5365 server-pulls later (two-years-in, now), and I'm partying like it's 2006 . . . .

Given that you have a (supported?) machine with ElCap, viddy teh appropos guidance from @MacVidCards wrt/TD from a supported Mac . . . those of us who have only an un-supported machine have to make-do with what we can-do.

Sorry for teh Ramble, but I've had far too much screen-time to make as much sense as I had originally intended....

 

[Casby]

Uh oh. Problems. I got El Capitan running with relative ease, replaced the boot.efi files and was going strong. I moved onto updating the SMC and I wish I didn't.

I tried using the MacProSMCupdate11 that was linked in the other big thread about 1,1>2,1 and it encountered an error somewhere and now it fails to boot. I started the MP as a target disk and tried recopying the updated boot.efi but still nothing. I start it up, I get the loading screen (the Pike black boot.efi) just like before and about halfway through, it just poops out and gives me the spinny dashed ball of thinking... and doesn't do anything else.

I'm going to try reinstalling the OS again from scratch and hope that clears it up. If that doesn't work, maybe try to install windows and see if there's anything I can do there. I'm just hoping that firmware update failure didn't turn it the MP into a shiny doorstop. If you know anything that might help please let me know.

 

[tyr2]

I start it up, I get the loading screen (the Pike black boot.efi) just like before and about halfway through, it just poops out and gives me the spinny dashed ball of thinking... and doesn't do anything else.

If you have more than one monitor connected try disconnecting them. Sometimes I get this behaviour when booting with multiple monitors connected.

 

[Casby]

Well I got the damn thing running again, El Crappy Tan (I mean that lovingly), and now I'm getting Kernel Panics. I'll be in the middle of something like opening a Finder window or something else that's asinine like using Safari and it crashes and reboots.

Kernel_task, geforceTesla, snurlsessiond,... a couple others. Tried to boot in Safe Mode but it wouldn't get that far. Tried to boot in Recovery Mode with no luck (Maybe because the boot.EFI was replaced only in the main boot volume?idk)

I've tried "repairing permissions" or using Disk Utility as it's all one now in 10.11. I really have no idea what to do any more.

 

[Bruce L]

Yikes Casby. I put the new video card in my Mac Pro yesterday. Everything was going well until I tried to install the El Capitan update. It seemed to lock-up so I had to do a hard shutdown by turning the power off. When I turned it on again it booted into a kernel panic screen. I am planning on doing a clean install. I am wondering if maybe my hacked Mac did not like the new video card or if ISP, Mediacom, dropped from the 100 Mbps download speed I am supposed to have down to 1 or 2 Mbps, which happens quite a bit where I live, and this caused a problem with the download. I will post something when I have time to do the re-install.

 

[haralds]

Just an update: 10.11.1 works.
I have SIP enabled, so I do not use Pike's scripts. I upgraded and when it did not load on reboot, I option-booted into another OS and restored boot.efi and Platforms.plist. It looks like this update did not touch the Recovery HD.
I rebooted after this and everything is fine.

 

[Bruce L]

Haralds what is SIP and what are Pike's scripts? I installed El Capitan on my Mac Pro by following a series of steps provided by RX2904 on this page: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads...os-x-el-capitan.1890435/page-24#post-22011624. The most difficult thing for me in the process was deleting the existing boot.efi so that I could replace it with Piker-Alpha's boot.efi.

 

[Casby]

Just an update: 10.11.1 works.
I have SIP enabled, so I do not use Pike's scripts. I upgraded and when it did not load on reboot, I option-booted into another OS and restored boot.efi and Platforms.plist. It looks like this update did not touch the Recovery HD.
I rebooted after this and everything is fine.

So you've got El Cap running with the original 32EFI? I don't understand how that's possible.

If that is the case, I'm going to try something and tell me if this is totally stupid and not even worth trying.

Set 1,1 MacPro as Target Disk
Use MBP with 10.11.1 to install 10.11 onto MacPro Hard Drive
NOT TOUCH THE BOOT.EFI
Boot into MacPro through the MBP and install the 10.11.1 update
Then option-boot to another OS (maybe lion?), restore the boot.efi/platform.plist from the "other OS" in this "other OS", and rebooted into El Capitan?

I feel like I'm missing something here because it doesn't sound like that should work.

 

[Bruce L]

Casey, Here is what worked for me.

I downloaded boot.efi here: http://piker-alpha.github.io/macosxbootloader/ and placed on my late 2012 Mac Mini Desktop.
I downloaded 10.11.1 but did not install. I copied the Install OS X El Capitan to the desktop of my Mac Mini running the same. I removed the primary hard drive from my Mac Pro 1,1 and put it to a NewerTech Voyager Q attached to my Mac Mini via Firewire 800. I clicked on the Install OS X El Capitan on my Desktop and pointed the install to the Mac Pro primary hard drive. From here I did the following per instructions I found here in Macrumors:

When finished the install I copied this command into Mac Terminal: defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES and hit return. After that I restarted the Finder. To restart the Finder hold down the Option key, right click and choose Relaunch.

I then replaced the attached below boot.efi in two directories of the external hard drive which are now visible thanks to the Terminal command I just used: The two directories are: /usr/standalone/i386/ and /System/Library/Coreservices/. The boot.efi in the CoreServices folder was write protected so I clicked on it once, hit CMD+I to show information and disabled the protection. Once I did that I deleted the existing boot.efi and replaced it with piker-alpha's boot.efi. My Notes: Even thought the :”usr” directory is greyed out, it will open if clicked on and the “standalone” and “i386” directories are not greyed out.

I then went to System Preferences/Startup Disk and chose my Mac Mini's drive, Macintosh HD. I ejected my Mac Pro Macintosh HD and powered off my NewerTech Voyager Q to be safe even though I believe this might be hot swappable.

The difficulty in my case is I only have one monitor and keyboard to share between the computers. Anyway I fired up my Mac Pro and it was running like a champ thanks to MacVidCards explaining that my previous video issues were caused by old video card being insufficient. I think it had 8 MB of RAM. My new card has 512 MB which is still small compared to what is on current cards.

I think this will work for you. Let us know.

 

[RX2904]

Anyone already updated to 10.11.1? Any issues? Does it overwrite the modified EFIs or leave them untouched?

 

[OGNerd]

Anyone already updated to 10.11.1? Any issues? Does it overwrite the modified EFIs or leave them untouched?

Yes, and mostly. The boot.efi file on the Recovery HD is untouched by the 10.11.1 update.

 

[RX2904]

Yes, and mostly. The boot.efi file on the Recovery HD is untouched by the 10.11.1 update.

Hi! Thank you for your answer. Just to be clear on this: Apart from the boot.efi file on the Recovery HD, the rest of the boot.efis (the two separate locations) are overwritten and I need to replace them again?

 

[F1Mac]

Hi! Thank you for your answer. Just to be clear on this: Apart from the boot.efi file on the Recovery HD, the rest of the boot.efis (the two separate locations) are overwritten and I need to replace them again?

Yep.

 

[jakesaunders27]

Does anyone have a start to finish tutorial on how to do this exactly. I'm currently on a pretty fresh Snow Leopard install on my 1,1. I used to have Yosemite on it but I'm not understanding how to do it for El Capitan.