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

[PeterHolbrook]

commit 81fa8702089b74dd292349865c6f1c4721eefd44: boots normal (both, El Capitan & Recovery HD) NO debug output.

peter, what about a boot.efi developers thread? it starts getting to be a bit crowdy in here with all the posts about installing El Capitan now.

Go ahead. Create it. Share the link here (or use a private message) and I'll post there.

So, do you think everything is working as it should now (even flushing the cache?). Have you tried whether placing the new bootbase.efi on the installer medium changes anything? Does it do what Pike seems to imply, regarding a "/Volumes/MacintoshHD/.IABootFiles/prelinkedkernel" and a special bless point of
Volumes/MacintoshHD/.IABootFiles that would make the "PikeYoseFix" daemon approach obsolete? In any case, we would still have to look into Pike's deceased sister's FileGuard to see if that would be convenient.

Yesterday morning I installed El Capitan on my old Mac Pro without any problems (this was before creating bootbase.efi). Unfortunately, in the afternoon I had to boot into Windows, which went well. When I tried to boot back into El Capitan, I received a kernel panic. Much as I tried booting things like sudo nvram boot-args="-x", "-v", "-f", "noacpi" and combinations thereof (while booted into Snow Leopard), nothing worked. In the end I had to reinstall El Capitan, which worked perfectly. Do you have any ideas as to what might have gone wrong?

 

[PeterHolbrook]

Nothing happened. Am I supposed to reboot or something?

Yes, you are supposed to boot, but the advice you've been give is invalid. Those parameters were valid only in the early betas of El Capitan.

 

[MacVidCards]

I use a 10.9.5 or 10.10.5 install to go access the files.

Much easier then doing from the running OS

rootless=0 stopped working at DP5

 

[mikeboss]

Go ahead. Create it. Share the link here (or use a private message) and I'll post there.

boot.efi developer's thread

 

[PowerMac G4 MDD]

I use a 10.9.5 or 10.10.5 install to go access the files.

Much easier then doing from the running OS

rootless stopped working at DP5

Okay, I'll try that tomorrow. I had read that, but had forgotten that I made a CCC back-up of my Mountain Lion user before making my main user El Capitan-ified. Thanks; I'll see how it goes, tomorrow. My plan is to get this all working and be content... before I have to take *gulp* the SAT on Saturday.

 

[PowerMac G4 MDD]

I use a 10.9.5 or 10.10.5 install to go access the files.

Much easier then doing from the running OS

rootless stopped working at DP5

Oh--also--should I clone the Mountain Lion user back onto my main HDD, run the command (whether these or the Recovery Partition commands you have in your guide), then go and install El Capitan back over Mountain Lion? Obviously, I have to be making the changes from the disk I'll be using... so I guess that means I'm going to have to go through cloning my stuff back and then installing El Capitan again.

Or, can I just access the HDD on which El Cap is installed (from an HDD that has Mountain Lion on it), and replace the boot files from there? Will it, by default, let me edit the files, from Mountain Lion, on a disk that currently has El Cap? I suppose it doesn't matter, since El Cap isn't going to be run at that given point in time. I guess I am just confusing myself here. I simply need sleep. If that second method I mentioned is the correct one, please say, "aye, Capitan!"

(Wow, Apple--your state-of-the-art security system involves locking me out of my own files? xD Soon enough, Mac OS will TRULY be the 'toy' that Windows users have criticized it as for over 30 years.)

 

[MacVidCards]

I look forward to these guys coming up with an installer package. I feel like I have posted same words over and over again and still lots of people bugger up replacing 2 simple files. (OK, they aren't simple, but it is just replacing TWO FILES, the developers did all of the heavy lifting already)

But I have been getting a better understanding of why Apple keeps dumbing everything down further and further. No matter how well you think you have explained everything, there always seem to be ways for others to misinterpret it and bugger it up.

1. Install on newer machine
2. On newer machine, boot into another OS X install from earlier OS
3. Replace those 2 files, take an extra 15 seconds to note that the size changes from 605Kb to 314Kb after you change them. This verifies that you really did it.
4. Make the Recovery partition visible and swap the boot.efi file there too. Again, after spending this much effort, why not view the file info and make sure that the changed size tells you it really happened?
5. Move drive to 1,1 and use.

Once you see how simple this is, then you can worry about migrating an install. I don't know if 10.7.5 can be directly updated and things will move. You can just use Migration Assistant, that may work. Can't speak to that, mine were all Yosemite to El Cap updates and worked fine.

System Restore can easily image an entire disk, do this first and you NEVER HAVE TO RISK ANYTHING. This is so basic. Copying your Pix folder over isn't doing a backup. Create an image of your drive first and you can screw it up 100 times and never lose anything. Isn't that better then biting your nails to the nub as you potentially ruin your only OS install or risk having to reinstall a bunch of stuff?

 

[mikeboss]

Yesterday morning I installed El Capitan on my old Mac Pro without any problems (this was before creating bootbase.efi). Unfortunately, in the afternoon I had to boot into Windows, which went well. When I tried to boot back into El Capitan, I received a kernel panic. Much as I tried booting things like sudo nvram boot-args="-x", "-v", "-f", "noacpi" and combinations thereof (while booted into Snow Leopard), nothing worked. In the end I had to reinstall El Capitan, which worked perfectly. Do you have any ideas as to what might have gone wrong?

what precedure did you use to install? fresh install from an installer media on the old Mac Pro or did you use a newer, supported machine first?

I have no idea what windows could have done to the El Capitan installation. I'm constantly booting OS X, windows an Linux. but not on the old Mac Pro TBH. I do this on the MacPro4,1/5,1.

 

[PeterHolbrook]

what precedure did you use to install? fresh install from an installer media on the old Mac Pro or did you use a newer, supported machine first?

I have no idea what windows could have done to the El Capitan installation. I'm constantly booting OS X, windows an Linux. but not on the old Mac Pro TBH. I do this on the MacPro4,1/5,1.

No, I didn't use a newer machine. I created install media from scratch (an 8Gb partition of an internal HD). I installed El Capitan on top of my existing Yosemite disk (without erasing anything first). I don't think Windows did anything to El Capitan. It may have been a glitch, and I think it was probably connected with a bad kernel cache.

 

[RX2904]

I just installed El Capitan. Was much easier than I thought it would be. Thanks to everyone who helped making this possible!

Here's a complete step by step guide what I did and what worked for me. This is very detailed and for some a couple of steps might be unnecessary because "of course you do that and you don't have to write THAT down", but from my experience that's where most mistakes happen.

So this is an How-to-upgrade-a-MacPro-2,1-from-Yosemite-to-El-Capitan-for-dummies.

(Hardware used: MacPro 2,1 running latest Yosemite 10.10.5, new Macbook Pro running El Capitan 10.11., empty hard drive) (Software used: Carbon Copy Cloner (bombich.com), Mac Terminal)

1. Connected an empty hard drive to my MacPro 2,1 and Carbon Copy Cloned my workstation hard drive onto an empty external hard drive.

Why? Because El Capitan is no use for me if it just works great on a fresh hard drive. To assess if El Capitan is a good system for me I need to test it in the environment I'm actually using every day without compromising the integrity of my workstation hard drive. That's why I make an identical copy of my workstation and test it there.

2. While carbon copying my hard drive I downloaded El Capitan on my Macbook Pro via the App Store. As I already run El Capitan on my MBP it asked me if I want to download nevertheless as an installer. Clicked yes.

3. Connected the carbon cloned external hard drive with my MBP and installed El Capitan onto that. Took about 30 minutes.

4. When finished I copied this command into Mac Terminal: defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES and hit return. After that I restarted the Finder.

5. 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 could replace the boot.efi. I checked the size of the new boot efis twice as they should have 314/315 kb, not 600 something as the original ones had.

6. I ejected the El Capitan external hard drive from my MBP, plugged it into my MacPro running Yosemite and fired up the machine. Once it booted into Yosemite, I changed the start volume and chose the El Capitan hard drive.

7. Done.

After I ran some tests and saw that it runs smoothly on the carbon copy I did the same procedure with my original workstation hard drive because that's an SSD and much much faster.

 

[MacVidCards]

I just installed El Capitan. Was much easier than I thought it would be. Thanks to everyone who helped making this possible!

Here's a complete step by step guide what I did and what worked for me. This is very detailed and for some a couple of steps might be unnecessary because "of course you do that and you don't have to write THAT down", but from my experience that's where most mistakes happen.

So this is an How-to-upgrade-a-MacPro-2,1-from-Yosemite-to-El-Capitan-for-dummies.

(Hardware used: MacPro 2,1 running latest Yosemite 10.10.5, new Macbook Pro running El Capitan 10.11., empty hard drive) (Software used: Carbon Copy Cloner (bombich.com), Mac Terminal)

1. Connected an empty hard drive to my MacPro 2,1 and Carbon Copy Cloned my workstation hard drive onto an empty external hard drive.

Why? Because El Capitan is no use for me if it just works great on a fresh hard drive. To assess if El Capitan is a good system for me I need to test it in the environment I'm actually using every day without compromising the integrity of my workstation hard drive. That's why I make an identical copy of my workstation and test it there.

2. While carbon copying my hard drive I downloaded El Capitan on my Macbook Pro via the App Store. As I already run El Capitan on my MBP it asked me if I want to download nevertheless as an installer. Clicked yes.

3. Connected the carbon cloned external hard drive with my MBP and installed El Capitan onto that. Took about 30 minutes.

4. When finished I copied this command into Mac Terminal: defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES and hit return. After that I restarted the Finder.

5. 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 could replace the boot.efi. I checked the size of the new boot efis twice as they should have 314/315 kb, not 600 something as the original ones had.

6. I ejected the El Capitan external hard drive from my MBP, plugged it into my MacPro running Yosemite and fired up the machine. Once it booted into Yosemite, I changed the start volume and chose the El Capitan hard drive.

7. Done.

After I ran some tests and saw that it runs smoothly on the carbon copy I did the same procedure with my original workstation hard drive because that's an SSD and much much faster.

Thank you. Glad to see someone have success. Check out the instructions I left in the Mac Pro section for enabling the recovery partition. You will need it sooner or later and better to have it already working.

Congrats again on getting it up and running, it is really easy if you pay attention and have another machine to install on originally. I firmly believe that checking file size will be an important step until it is automated.

 

[RX2904]

Thank you. Glad to see someone have success. Check out the instructions I left in the Mac Pro section for enabling the recovery partition. You will need it sooner or later and better to have it already working.

Congrats again on getting it up and running, it is really easy if you pay attention and have another machine to install on originally. I firmly believe that checking file size will be an important step until it is automated.

Hi! Thank you for your post.

One thing I have noticed: Video quality when playing an MP4 with my Radeon 5770 is now slightly worse than before. I wanted to buy a used 7970 anyway, so I guess I'll do that now.

Also thank you for the Recovery Partition advice. May I ask what "Mac Pro section" you are referring to? I have read literally hundreds of posts the last 48 hrs, so I can't quite remember where I read what. Kindly point me to it.

Thanks again!

 

[MacVidCards]

The Mac Pro section of this forum

 

[F1Mac]

One thing I have noticed: Video quality when playing an MP4 with my Radeon 5770 is now slightly worse than before.

What do you mean? worse how?

 

[RX2904]

What do you mean? worse how?

I'm watching a 720p mp4 file right now and the edges of faces or clothes are now slightly fringed. It wasn't like that in Yosemite. I'm pretty sure, because I noticed it right away.

EDIT: I just found that it's a video player issue. MplayerX now fringes edges, VLC does not. That was definitely not the case with Yosemite. Might have to look for a new vid player, always used mplayerX, never liked VLC.

You can see it quite clearly when you look at the collar and the NFL Logo.

 

[PeterHolbrook]

Everything seems to be working for me in El Capitan, except for FaceTime. Such calls always fail, whether I make them or receive them. Does it work for you? If you have more modern hardware, does it work on that hardware?

 

[sweetspud]

Man, I can't wait until El Capitan is released! This sounds like a blast. I'm pretty sure that the last time I had a CURRENT version of Mac OSX on my computer/s was back when I got my OG iMac G5 w/ 10.3.9 Panther. I may have upgraded to Tiger while it was still current, but I definitely didn't get Leopard until it had already been out for a while... or possibly once Snow Leopard was already out. Sure, my 2009 MBP can run Yosemite (I have a partition), but I don't use it; Snow Leopard (which I didn't switch to until around 2012 or 2013) serves me just fine. Maybe once El Capitan is here, I'll overwrite Snow Leopard altogether.

BTW, sorry if I may have missed this, but are you running El Capitan from an SSD or an HDD? I was convinced that something was fishy with my Mac Pro, as I run into certain lag spikes when trying to open applications... but then I realized that my HDD was old, slow, and messed up. I replaced it with this HDD that I pulled from another computer, but it's an old WD Blue drive--who knows if it's even a 7200RPM drive.

I may just end up getting an SSD, but I wonder if a 7200RPM drive could be enough. After all, my second HDD IS a 7200RPM drive, but I use that for backups. Maybe I ought to transfer my user to it.

EDIT: I saw in an older post that you had an SSD, which is what I remembered. In spite of the fact that the Mac Pro uses a SATA II interface (unless I'm wrong), it may just be worth it to pick up a SATA III drive that could end up being used on any other machine. What are your read and write speeds with your 1,1 Mac Pro's SSD?

Get the SSD! I have one running Yosemite on my Mac Pro 1,1 - 1,2 and it's THE best thing I've ever done for the computer - FAST!

Also, get an Apple edition of the ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB or better yet (for El Capitan), the Apple edition of the Sapphire Radeon HD 7950.

 

[hugoZA]

Installed the same way I did Yosemite (HDD on USB connected to MBPR) and it worked perfect 1st time. Only issue I can identify is that plugging a USB HDD into any one of the front USB ports reboots the Mac Pro.

 

[Cloro]

Hi, everyone! I've just arrived into the forum.

I've been reading some posts about installing El Capitán in my old Mac Pro. I really need to revitalised my workstation. I updated it with a 500GB SSD, 16GB RAM and 5770 graphics, but if I can't use newer OS X I'm afraid it's time and money lost. So, I'm missing a step by step tutorial for install El Capitán from scratch in a empty SSD (a fresh installation I mean). People like me, who works with computers but does not understand too much about computers, would really appreciate that. I understand you have to replace the boot file, etc... but when I was about formatting my SSD in order to try the installation I realised I don't know whats the process exactly should be.

Thanks all of you that working and sharing your knowledge. It's great.

 

[mikeboss]

Installed the same way I did Yosemite (HDD on USB connected to MBPR) and it worked perfect 1st time. Only issue I can identify is that plugging a USB HDD into any one of the front USB ports reboots the Mac Pro.

what happens when you're connecting a USB stick in one of the front ports? and if you're connecting the external HD in one of the USB ports at the back, the system behaves normally?

 

[Razieln64]

I would be willing to bet money (if it wasn't banned here at MR) that one of your boot.efi files was still 605Kb.

I have made more then 10 El Cap boot drives since the Beta program started, each time worked fine, and when I did have a bad one it was a single boot.efi that hadn't changed, despite me not seeing a dialog that it had failed to replace existing one.

Now that you mention it, I might have just copied a boot.efi file without deleting the original first. I got no error message and assumed it had worked. That might be it. So maybe my installer was good afterall. It's no big deal if I wasn't able to upgrade and started fresh. My OSX has been upgraded since Tiger so I had a lot of old stuff that could have slowed down my computer. I'll just miss CS5 that I don't use that much anyways.

 

[F1Mac]

I'll just miss CS5 that I don't use that much anyways.

? I have Photoshop CS5.5 running on my Mid-2012 MacPro with El Capitan. Just update your Java runtime and your good to go (the Finder will warn you and give you the link to download)

 

[hugoZA]

what happens when you're connecting a USB stick in one of the front ports? and if you're connecting the external HD in one of the USB ports at the back, the system behaves normally?

When I connect to the front the Pro freezes and reboots. Connected to the back it works fine.

 

[PeterHolbrook]

Boot without kBootArgsFlagCSRBoot (allow all). Contains BOTH boot.efi AND bootbase.efi

To everyone interested in this project:

[P]eople must be aware that [this and other] interim future versions are NOT intended as a replacement for the official repository versions. Until further notice, those of you who want to use Pike's boot.efi ought to go to http://piker-alpha.github.io/macosxbootloader/ and download either the "black" version or the "grey" one, according to your particular preference (the change is purely cosmetic; otherwise, they are exactly the same; the choice is irrelevant as far as the operating system is concerned). Pike alone will decide when such repository versions will be updated with a newer version.

Please, notice that the [enclosed and other] upcoming experimental versions might contain bugs that could cripple your ability to boot your old Mac. So, unless you are absolutely certain of what you are doing and know how to reverse such undesirable situations, KEEP AWAY FROM THEM. In general terms, [these] versions ARE NOT FOR YOU!

 

[mikeboss]

Boot without kBootArgsFlagCSRBoot (allow all). Contains BOTH boot.efi AND bootbase.efi

wrong thread