2006/2007 Mac Pro (1,1/2,1) and OS X El Capitan

[rthpjm]

Oh yeah, I read that. I ordered 6 pin header so I can plug in this GTX 660 I have. That should solve my video problems, right? I was just more excited I actually got El Capitan running on an 8GB system.

What do I do about the WiFi/BT card? What's the recommended replacement? I think I have an Intel Wifi/BT 4.0 combo card in my one dead PC that I might be able to repurpose into this system.

I'm still using the stock card. Never changed it. For me all the functions still work. I can even use handoff!!
I purchased my 1,1 MacPro from new (1 careful owner). The upgrades that I have made are:
CPUs 5345 @ 2.33GHz, and the firmware update to 2,1.
RAM 32Gb
Graphics, XFX HD 5770
2nd OD, Bluray combo, off the SATA, (still using the PATA Apple/Sony original DVD SuperDrive)
Lots of Tb of spinning disk.

Your GTX660 will work great, but probably won't show the EFI-based initial boot screens. Once the Mac OS X kernel takes over the Nvidia graphics driver (kext) will kick in. See my post a couple of pages back (#2558)

 

[plentyoftimeto69]

Sweet! I'm just waiting on my power connector then and the 660 is going in.

8GB is fine for El Cap. I'm running 8 gigs in my MacBook Air and it runs 10.11 like a beast. I whipped an old 450GB 10k Western Digital in the Pro before installing OS X so disk i/o is pretty decent for an old machine like that.

For anybody looking, there's a fella selling 32GB "kits" for the Mac Pro's for $39.99 on eBay right now. It's tempting to buy 32 gigs for mine, but the least amount of money I can sink into this nearly 10 year old beast the better.
[doublepost=1468863954][/doublepost]So wait, the stock wifi/bt card can handle Airdrop etc...?

 

[hwojtek]

No, it can not. You must upgrade BT and Airport to make use of Airdrop/Continuity.
32GB for $40 seems like the best money EVER spent on a 1/2,1.

 

[dickmnixon]

10.11.6 has been released. Will wait for others to report any issues, seems like a minor update.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206770

EDIT: Updated without issue.

Most likely the last one this machine will see. Thanks to all involved in keeping my 10 y.o. cheese grater in action.

 

[richgoga]

10.11.6 has been released. Will wait for others to report any issues, seems like a minor update.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206770

Hassle free update. Didn't even need to replace the boot.efi files this time around.

Probably the last update these old Macs will see.

 

[dickmnixon]

[doublepost=1468863954][/doublepost]So wait, the stock wifi/bt card can handle Airdrop etc...?[/QUOTE]

It works for me no problem.

 

[plentyoftimeto69]

I don't have Airdrop options, but if I do a:

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser BrowseAllInterfaces 1

It should work? I'll give it a try later when I get home from the office today.

 

[joeberk]

Anyone upgrade successfully from .4 to .6 successfully?

 

[owbp]

Anyone upgrade successfully from .4 to .6 successfully?

10.11.5 overwrites boot.efi files. Other than, not one problem with 10.11.6 update.

 

[plentyoftimeto69]

I followed the directions for boot64 on page 56 and I was able to update from 10.11.4 to 10.11.5 without having to redo the boot.efi files.

 

[plentyoftimeto69]

10.11.6 update didn't mess up my boot.efi either. I rebooted without a hitch.

 

[HD Boy]

The last two OS X update downloads (10.11.5 and 10.11.6) download and auto-install without presenting a splash screen — or an opportunity to pause and save the Installer file before it runs. Am I doing something wrong, or do I have to download and run the Combo installer again (as I did with 10.11.5)? Installing on a Mac Pro 2,1 with an OWC 512GB SSD that has been running since Lion...

Holy crap.

I just downloaded the OS X v10.11.6 installer from the App Store and it authorized and installed the update directly on this Mac Pro (2,1) without having to run it from my 2009 Mac Book Pro in Target Disk Mode attached to this machine via Firewire! What's up with that?

 

[plentyoftimeto69]

Yeah man, from what I've read if you installed off a pikify scripted USB then you have boot64 v3 already in place. I was able to update from 10.11.4 to 10.11.5 to 10.11.6 right from the app store because I installed boot64.

 

[rthpjm]

Yeah man, from what I've read if you installed off a pikify scripted USB then you have boot64 v3 already in place. I was able to update from 10.11.4 to 10.11.5 to 10.11.6 right from the app store because I installed boot64.

Strictly speaking, the pikify install method prepares the machine for Boot64, it is not pre-installed you still have to install it.

The steps to modify SIP to exclude the boot.efi files from SIP's protection are in place if you use the pikify method to install.

If you don't use the pikify method to install then you need to perform steps 1-4 of post 1391 (as well as all the other steps) when installing Boot64.

 

[Ant3000]

Just updated to 10.11.6 (running Boot64) all seems OK except once again I ended up with my Mac reporting I had 2 Logitech receivers and 2 mice/mouses attached. It has done this before though after an update but a further reboot sorts it out. Not sure why - but no big deal.

EDIT: I was going from 10.11.5

 

[joeberk]

My .4 to .6 upgrade went wrong along the way - machine now boots into Disk Utility. I could have sworn I installed boot64 when I originally installed, but ...

Will try post #1391 and report back.

 

[plentyoftimeto69]

Strictly speaking, the pikify install method prepares the machine for Boot64, it is not pre-installed you still have to install it.

The steps to modify SIP to exclude the boot.efi files from SIP's protection are in place if you use the pikify method to install.

If you don't use the pikify method to install then you need to perform steps 1-4 of post 1391 (as well as all the other steps) when installing Boot64.

Oh, okay. I'm still learning this whole Mac Pro resurrection process. Thanks for clarifying!

My .4 to .6 upgrade went wrong along the way - machine now boots into Disk Utility. I could have sworn I installed boot64 when I originally installed, but ...

Will try post #1391 and report back.

If you're dead in the water you can re-copy your boot.efi from your recovery partition back to the system partition and it should boot.

Now I have a question. Everything appears to work okay on this Mac Pro. Airdrop doesn't, but that seems hit or miss depending on what kinda wifi/bt card is in the system. The biggest gripe I have is that the machine doesn't suspend or even shut down the display per the power options. Is that simply because I'm still using an unsupported video card? Think that'll resolve itself when I put the 660 in there? I'm still waiting for my power connector to be delivered.
[doublepost=1468963083][/doublepost]Also, I have three 1TB disks in this thing I want to use as storage, but apparently I can't RAID 5 these things natively? Anybody have a suggested solution?

 

[rthpjm]

Oh, okay. I'm still learning this whole Mac Pro resurrection process. Thanks for clarifying!



If you're dead in the water you can re-copy your boot.efi from your recovery partition back to the system partition and it should boot.

Now I have a question. Everything appears to work okay on this Mac Pro. Airdrop doesn't, but that seems hit or miss depending on what kinda wifi/bt card is in the system. The biggest gripe I have is that the machine doesn't suspend or even shut down the display per the power options. Is that simply because I'm still using an unsupported video card? Think that'll resolve itself when I put the 660 in there? I'm still waiting for my power connector to be delivered.
[doublepost=1468963083][/doublepost]Also, I have three 1TB disks in this thing I want to use as storage, but apparently I can't RAID 5 these things natively? Anybody have a suggested solution?

The suspend issue can sometimes be resolved by performing a PRAM reset and/or an SMC/PMU reset...

To reset the PRAM, reboot, when you hear the chime, hold down 4 keys Apple-ALT-P-R, release the keys when you hear the next chime.

To reset the SMC/PMU power off the MacPro, remover the power cord, open the side panel, look closely at the top right side of the motherboard, it sometimes helps if you remove the HDD sled in bay 4, you should see a small push button. Press and hold this push button for approx 5 seconds. Refit everything, then power on.

If none of those clears the fault, you might have a process running that isn't quitting/suspending. There are some techniques to find these ( I seem to remember someone detailing them on this thread, but there's 100 pages!!!!). You might look into the lsof command.

For RAID, MacOSX has a software RAID feature, but it's only really centred on spanning and mirroring (0 and 1 I think). There is CoreStorage, which is Apple's logical volume manager, but it don't think it takes RAID any further.

You can purchase Apple or third party PCI-based raid cards. These give you full featured hardware-based RAID. This is a neat solution since it is cable-less, plug it in and the 4 existing bays become RAID capable.....

Other than that it's external options. Personally I've built my own external RAID using
Icybox ib-555 for convenience, inside an external case, with an IOI SPM-393 SATA-based hardware RAID controller. You can then get an E-SATA cable set to bring the spare SATA ports to the rear of the MacPro

 

[plentyoftimeto69]

Okay, awesome. I'm familiar with PRAM and SMC resets. I don't know why I didn't even think of that. This system isn't running anything my MacBook isn't, in fact it's running less, and that system suspends fine so I don't think it's a runaway process. I will check though.

I do like the cable-less solution! Maybe I'll eBay a RAID card on the cheap so I can R5 these disks. I read that installing OpenZFS on OS X may be a viable software solution too, but I need to do more reading up on it. Right now I have a Netgear ReadyNAS running R0 attached to the network for simple storage, but it'd be cool to have another 2TB of redundant storage directly attached to this system since I plan on using it to do video editing, graphics editing, and mostly audio recording in my home studio. GarageBand is really the #1 reason I prefer OS X over Windows. Well, that and the audio processing subsystem on OS X isn't garbage.

FYI I'm an IT director and have been working IT for like 18 years. Feel free to lay some technical stuff on me; I'll understand what you're saying.

 

[joeberk]

My .4 to .6 upgrade went wrong along the way - machine now boots into Disk Utility. I could have sworn I installed boot64 when I originally installed, but ...

Will try post #1391 and report back.

I got my .4 to .6 upgrade to work after copying the boot.efi from my backup drive. Thanks for the advice.

 

[dfritchie]

Upgraded from .5 to .6 today, no issues at all. Didn't mess with boot.efi, I don't run pikify or boot64.

 

[-texan-]

I also upgraded from .5 to .6 today, with no issue at all. The update didn't replaced my boot.efi.

 

[spin498]

Does anyone know what this update rewrites? I managed to get my system to run 11.5 by using the web driver from NVIDIA's site, rather than the one supplied by El Capitan. I've just done the update and unlike everyone else it crapped out my system. I used Time Machine to restore to the hour before I installed the update but it still wouldn't boot. Hangs at the cursor coming live (as it has all the other times) . When I boot into safe mode the NVIDIA drivers app says there's no driver there. I had to rerun the 'pkg' to install and the system worked again.

 

[Ant3000]

I didn't think any of the Nvidia drivers were included with El Capitan - AMD drivers are though - so it may be they need to be updated from Nvidia website. From what I have read, there is often a short delay between an OS update and the drivers appearing.

 

[swampy50]

Does anyone know what this update rewrites? I managed to get my system to run 11.5 by using the web driver from NVIDIA's site, rather than the one supplied by El Capitan. I've just done the update and unlike everyone else it crapped out my system. I used Time Machine to restore to the hour before I installed the update but it still wouldn't boot. Hangs at the cursor coming live (as it has all the other times) . When I boot into safe mode the NVIDIA drivers app says there's no driver there. I had to rerun the 'pkg' to install and the system worked again.

The update overwrote your Nvidia driver from Nvidia.. (I have an Nvidia GTX 620 2 gig card I use for El Capitan) I had this happen before. I was able to boot in with my X1900 card which is in another slot and Nvidia did update the driver for 10.11.6 the next day.

OSX Update on Tuesday..Nvidia new drivers on Wednesday. If you have an older Mac graphics card..It's good to keep it for when Apple updates knock your Nvidia card out.

It seems that though Apple supported some out of the box PC Nvidia cards from OSX 7.5 and further , they don't support all..