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

[jwjohnsonjr]

This may be a stupid question, but i've got two mac pro 1,1. One has been upgraded to a "2,1". I can get El Capitan to install and run on the 2,1 machine, but the install hangs on the 1,1. The 2,1 has an upgraded video card while the 1,1 has an ATI 2600. Is the video card the likely problem on the 1,1? Also, a very special thanks to all you guys who post files for us stupid people. It's very much appreciated.

 

[drkheure]

I did the install on a macbookpro and moved the ssd or disk.
Its a 1.1 original firmware. Geforce 650 ti. ( unflashed )
Maybe I'll get some new memory later,
But just to be clear the machine currently runs windows 7 and yosemite fine.
Not like used to work, it works perfectly now !!!
[doublepost=1452124018][/doublepost]Have you tried moving the disk between the 1.1 and 2.1 ?

 

[jwjohnsonjr]

I did the install on a macbookpro and moved the ssd or disk.
Its a 1.1 original firmware. Geforce 650 ti. ( unflashed )
Maybe I'll get some new memory later,
But just to be clear the machine currently runs windows 7 and yosemite fine.
Not like used to work, it works perfectly now !!!
[doublepost=1452124018][/doublepost]Have you tried moving the disk between the 1.1 and 2.1 ?

That's my next step I guess. I'll try that tomorrow and see.

 

[Ant3000]

This may be a stupid question, but i've got two mac pro 1,1. One has been upgraded to a "2,1". I can get El Capitan to install and run on the 2,1 machine, but the install hangs on the 1,1. The 2,1 has an upgraded video card while the 1,1 has an ATI 2600. Is the video card the likely problem on the 1,1? Also, a very special thanks to all you guys who post files for us stupid people. It's very much appreciated.

How much RAM do you have in each machine - are there any 512mb chips in any of them? As noted many times, 12gb of RAM is needed and 512 chips cause problems. If RAM is OK then swapping the disk is a good way to test - I think 12gb is only needed for the install but you can never have too much - you could always add more memory from the working Mac to the other and see what happens when you try to install - or install on the 1.1 disk via the 2.1 by swapping the disk for the install or by Target Disk mode.

 

[dfritchie]

The video card in your 1,1 is not supported and may be the problem. Also I installed El Cap on mine with only 10 GB ram, 2 GB being original 512 MB sticks from Apple. Ram is cheap so if I was you I would upgrade to at least 16 GB ( which I have done since).

 

[jwjohnsonjr]

The video card in your 1,1 is not supported and may be the problem. Also I installed El Cap on mine with only 10 GB ram, 2 GB being original 512 MB sticks from Apple. Ram is cheap so if I was you I would upgrade to at least 16 GB ( which I have done since).

The 1,1 has 12 GB in it now. The 2,1 has 20 GB in it. The 1,1 has the ati video card that only has 256MB. The 2,1 has the 5770 with 1GB. I plan to try one of the el capitan drives tomorrow morning to see if it will fly or not in the older machine. I'll post whether or not it works.

Another stupid question - is El Capitan worth the trouble? I've heard good things about it - how programs load faster, how they use less memory, etc., but i wonder if it's worth the hassle other than saying you're running the latest operating system.

 

[rthpjm]

How much RAM do you have in each machine - are there any 512mb chips in any of them? As noted many times, 12gb of RAM is needed and 512 chips cause problems. If RAM is OK then swapping the disk is a good way to test - I think 12gb is only needed for the install but you can never have too much - you could always add more memory from the working Mac to the other and see what happens when you try to install - or install on the 1.1 disk via the 2.1 by swapping the disk for the install or by Target Disk mode.

I've seen a number of posts just lately expressing concern over the memory requirement and my use of the phrase "possible memory leak". Let me see if I can put people's minds at ease...

The requirement for 12GB of RAM is evidential, most users have found that the install process as developed for the pikify3.1 scripting (by me ) requires a minimum of 12GB of RAM (although I note @dfritchie says s/he managed it with 10GB).

12GB only applies for the pikify3.1 method of installing. I have tried to track down what is consuming the memory but I haven't been able to put my finger on it. I have suggested that maybe it is a "memory leak" but that hypothesis remains unproven.

The other possibility is that the pikify method uses the Apple createinstallmedia tool (which is designed create install media for read-only media such as DVD). When this method boots up, it assumes read-only media, so it creates a number of RAM-disks to boot from. It runs the install process from these RAM-disks. One of the steps in the Installation process logs this line in the log file "Activated virtual memory backing store at mount point '/Volumes/El Capitan'". Now virtual memory is usually swap space to the hard disk, but for this installer environment the disks are all RAM-based, therefore it is entirely possible that as the installer unpacks the data onto the destination HDD, it is also using the backing store (which is in RAM). Again, this is just a hypothesis and I have not proved it.

Here is a graph of free memory. The three lines represent 3 installation runs, the top 2 lines represent 2 different versions of pikify3.1 run with 32GB RAM installed, the third line represents a failed install when the machine had 8GB RAM installed.
Hopefully the picture says it all. As the installation proceeds, the available RAM decreases. Not a problem at 32GBs installed, but causes the 8GB run to fail early because available RAM space dropped to zero.​

​

That said, you do not need 12GB of RAM if you use "the other machine" method. If you use another "supported" machine with your MacPro disk drive attached (either from Target Disk mode, or temporarily in an external drive enclosure, or temporarily fitted into the chassis of a newer MacPro 3.1 or higher), then a minimum of 2GB of RAM is suggested for the install.

It's worth noting that "the other machine method" does not require the use of the pikify3.1 built media. You can run the El Capitan installer directly. Once it completes remember to manually copy the Pike boot.efi files into place before you return the HDD to the MacPro....

Once you have the OS installed onto your disk, using the Pike boot.efi files, and you boot your MacPro from it, most users have reported a great experience.

However, a number of users have reported numerous crashes and difficulties. Empirically it has been discovered that the combination of El Capitan, 32-bit-efi machines, and 512MB original DIMMs seems to be the common factor. Every user who has reported kernel panics has been advised to buy new larger capacity RAM DIMMs, and has subsequently reported back that their system has stabilised. The recommendation is to purchase 2GB or 4GB DIMMs in pairs, as many as you can afford.

Personally, I have 8 x 4GB DIMMs, some of which have Apple-style heat sinks, and some of which have the more typical flat heat spreaders. I keep my Mac clean, so airflow remains good. Like everyone, I was concerned about the heat profile of the heat-spreader DIMMs, so for the first few months I was constantly watching the reported temps. In my experience there is very little temperature difference (reported), and I have long since stopped worrying about it. My MacPro 2,1(1,1) was rock solid at Yosemite, and has been rock solid under El Capitan.

There is NO evidence of a memory leak under normal operation.​

I hope that helps put some context around it, and helps calm people's fears!

 

[jwjohnsonjr]

Thanks rthpjm! The script file worked great on the 2,1. As far as the Mac Pro 1,1, swapping the working El Capitan drive to the 1,1 worked just fine other than the Microsoft Office will have to be initiated. You above post about the "memory leaks" makes a lot of sense. I'm obviously not an expert, but it sounds like a very plausible theory. I have noticed some lag in el capitan on the mac pro 1,1. I don't know if it's the older dual core processors, only having 12GB of ram, a 256MB video card, or just too much crap starting as the machine boots. It seems to work a little better in Yosemite, but it may be because it's the first start up with 10.11. In any case, i'll give it a run and see how it works. Again, thanks for the quick responses from everyone and the good suggestions!

 

[rthpjm]

Thanks rthpjm! The script file worked great on the 2,1. As far as the Mac Pro 1,1, swapping the working El Capitan drive to the 1,1 worked just fine other than the Microsoft Office will have to be initiated. You above post about the "memory leaks" makes a lot of sense. I'm obviously not an expert, but it sounds like a very plausible theory. I have noticed some lag in el capitan on the mac pro 1,1. I don't know if it's the older dual core processors, only having 12GB of ram, a 256MB video card, or just too much crap starting as the machine boots. It seems to work a little better in Yosemite, but it may be because it's the first start up with 10.11. In any case, i'll give it a run and see how it works. Again, thanks for the quick responses from everyone and the good suggestions!

That lag could be a number of things.

Spotlight can take a long time to re-index everything, and it runs in the background, if you give it a few hours it settles down.

This version of the OS is fully Metal aware, so Apple's focus is on Metal capable gfx cards. There is now a hierarchy of graphics capability and hardware, where previously we had Quartz Extreme, and OpenGL acceleration, now there is Metal sitting above that (or should that be described as "alongside"?!). Even worse for us MacPro 1,1/2,1 die-hards, the PCI bus in our old machines largely negates the performance gains of installing a cutting edge Metal-capable gfx card. I'm not saying you won't see any benefit if you install a PCIE 2 or 3 based card, you probably will, but don't expect to see blistering frame-rates in the latest graphics intensive games. The PCI bus will not be able to push the huge quantity of data to the gfx card quick enough. For normal operation though you would probably see a benefit for Metal-capable hardware.
(See below)

I think you said your 1,1 has an older gfx card. It might be worth sourcing another 5770 (or better).

Personally I have also found that checking what LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons are running also helps. I was experiencing 'spinning beachball' pauses when scrolling in Safari. After a bit of housekeeping (stopping and unloading unnecessary Launch Agents/Daemons, and deleting the respective definition plist files, along with turning off and deleting some Safari extensions that I didn't even know were loaded!) has definitely improved things dramatically. My gut feeling was Google's background update processes was the most likely suspect (updates Google apps like Google Earth), it was certainly filling the system.log with lots of diagnostic output very frequently. Having stopped it, my instances of spinning beachball pauses have gone away!. (To be fair to Google, I did clean up some other stuff, like some MalwareBytes Agent/Daemons at the same time, so I might pointing an accusing finger in the wrong direction!).

Older systems tend to accumulate "stuff" that is no longer needed or perhaps impacting performance unnecessarily. What can I say?!

 

[thomasareed]

(To be fair to Google, I did clean up some other stuff, like some MalwareBytes Agent/Daemons at the same time, so I might pointing an accusing finger in the wrong direction!).

That Malwarebytes launch daemon doesn't keep a process loaded in the background all the time, it's just for a privileged helper tool that is only active when the Malwarebytes Anti-Malware for Mac app is active.

That said, your idea about looking through launch agents and daemons for possible culprits is a good one. Most of the time, these things are used to keep a process running in the background, or run a process periodically in the background.

Thomas Reed
Director of Mac Offerings, Malwarebytes

 

[hwojtek]

Even worse for us MacPro 1,1/2,1 die-hards, the PCI bus in our old machines largely negates the performance gains of installing a cutting edge Metal-capable gfx card. I'm not saying you won't see any benefit if you install a PCIE 2 or 3 based card, you probably will, but don't expect to see blistering frame-rates in the latest graphics intensive games. The PCI bus will not be able to push the huge quantity of data to the gfx card quick enough.

I beg to differ. Please check the FPS here:

Even the most modern graphics card will have trouble saturating PCIe 1.0 x16 bandwidth.

 

[rthpjm]

That Malwarebytes launch daemon doesn't keep a process loaded in the background all the time, it's just for a privileged helper tool that is only active when the Malwarebytes Anti-Malware for Mac app is active.

That said, your idea about looking through launch agents and daemons for possible culprits is a good one. Most of the time, these things are used to keep a process running in the background, or run a process periodically in the background.

Thomas Reed
Director of Mac Offerings, Malwarebytes

Thanks Thomas

And to be fair to Malware Bytes, I cleaned out some others too. I was trying to say that I can't single out any one....
[doublepost=1452195295][/doublepost]

I beg to differ. Please check the FPS here:

Even the most modern graphics card will have trouble saturating PCIe 1.0 x16 bandwidth.

Thanks hwojtek

I should know better than to make generalisations

 

[brianr66]

Can anyone help me on this? I have no idea what's happening but I'm following this set of instructions and keep getting this in terminal...

Last login: Fri Jan 8 14:43:35 on ttys000

Mac-Pro:~ brianrolfe$ sudo -s

Password:

bash-3.2# ./createpikeinstallmedia /Volumes/Untitled

bash: ./createpikeinstallmedia: No such file or directory

bash-3.2#

 

[drkheure]

Can anyone help me on this? I have no idea what's happening but I'm following this set of instructions and keep getting this in terminal...

Last login: Fri Jan 8 14:43:35 on ttys000

Mac-Pro:~ brianrolfe$ sudo -s

Password:

bash-3.2# ./createpikeinstallmedia /Volumes/Untitled

bash: ./createpikeinstallmedia: No such file or directory

bash-3.2#

assuming you typed sudo su -
you became root, so your current home directory will be somehing like /private/var/root
you have to cd to where the files are
# cd /Users/whateverYouAre/Downloads
then cd in the proper directory
you can check with ls if the file is there.
# ls

 

[Ant3000]

Can anyone help me on this? I have no idea what's happening but I'm following this set of instructions and keep getting this in terminal...

Last login: Fri Jan 8 14:43:35 on ttys000

Mac-Pro:~ brianrolfe$ sudo -s

Password:

bash-3.2# ./createpikeinstallmedia /Volumes/Untitled

bash: ./createpikeinstallmedia: No such file or directory

bash-3.2#

Post 1569 has quite clear guidance on this - it worked for me anyway.

 

[brianr66]

Post 1569 has quite clear guidance on this - it worked for me anyway.

Perfect, thanks that makes it much clearer, will have another crack at this over the weekend.
[doublepost=1452278422][/doublepost]

Perfect, thanks that makes it much clearer, will have another crack at this over the weekend.

Well I tried again and I'm clearly going wrong somewhere despite following the notes I'm constantly getting bash-3.2# and no suchfileordirectory

 

[chackett]

Perfect, thanks that makes it much clearer, will have another crack at this over the weekend.
[doublepost=1452278422][/doublepost]
Well I tried again and I'm clearly going wrong somewhere despite following the notes I'm constantly getting bash-3.2# and no suchfileordirectory

What does the prompt in the terminal say? It shows the path to your current directory so it should end with pikify3.1. If it doesn't that's why it isn't working.

 

[hwojtek]

Did you cd to the directory that actually contains extracted ./createpikeinstallmedia in it?

Last login: Fri Jan  8 22:42:35 on console
Wojteks-Mac-Pro:~ wojtek$ sudo -s
Password:
bash-3.2# cd /Users/wojtek/Desktop/El\ Capitan\ -\ pikify3.1 
bash-3.2# ls
.DS_Store        OSInstall.collection    boot_black_3_1.efi    bootbase.efi        missing-fonts.tgz
Boot64.v3.mpkg        boot.efi        boot_grey_3_1.efi    createpikeinstallmedia    pikify.pkg
bash-3.2# ./createpikeinstallmedia 

    Usage ./createpikeinstallmedia /Volume/your_volume

        WARNING: the volume you specify will be erased!

        Make sure you provide the correct path to the volume...

bash-3.2#

 

[brianr66]

What does the prompt in the terminal say? It shows the path to your current directory so it should end with pikify3.1. If it doesn't that's why it isn't working.

This is what I'm getting...

Last login: Fri Jan 8 18:31:58 on ttys000

Mac-Pro:~ brianrolfe$ sudo -s

Password:

bash-3.2# cd ~/Users/brianrolfe/Downloads/pikify3.1

bash: cd: /Users/brianrolfe/Users/brianrolfe/Downloads/pikify3.1: No such file or directory

bash-3.2#

 

[Ant3000]

I assume you have unzipped the Pikify3.1 file you downloaded?
I put it on the desktop to make it slightly easier to drag into the Terminal window.

 

[brianr66]

I assume you have unzipped the Pikify3.1 file you downloaded?
I put it on the desktop to make it slightly easier to drag into the Terminal window.

Yes it's just a folder I'm dragging to terminal.

 

[Ant3000]

What files are in the Pikify folder?
I have 8 items
boot black
boot grey
booted...
createpikein...
missing- fonts
osinstall
pikify.pkg

USB key needs to be called "Untitled" to be found by the script.
You have the ElCapitan installer downloaded from Apple in your Applications folder?

 

[brianr66]

What files are in the Pikify folder?
I have 8 items
boot black
boot grey
booted...
createpikein...
missing- fonts
osinstall
pikify.pkg

USB key needs to be called "Untitled" to be found by the script.
You have the ElCapitan installer downloaded from Apple in your Applications folder?

Yes I have 8 too and my external drive is named Untitled.

 

[Ant3000]

Should there NOT be a space between ~ and your username? Just a guess.
Mac-Pro:~ brianrolfe$ sudo -s

On second thoughts, this is generated in Terminal so probably OK. Just looking for errors that may explain why this isn't working. I had El Cap installer in Apps folder, Pikify on desktop and 8gb memory stick "Untitled" plugged in.

 

[brianr66]

Yes there is...
Last login: Sat Jan 9 13:28:53 on ttys000

Mac-Pro:~ brianrolfe$
[doublepost=1452346844][/doublepost]

Should there NOT be a space between ~ and your username? Just a guess.
Mac-Pro:~ brianrolfe$ sudo -s

On second thoughts, this is generated in Terminal so probably OK. Just looking for errors that may explain why this isn't working. I had El Cap installer in Apps folder, Pikify on desktop and 8gb memory stick "Untitled" plugged in.

It's strange I can't even get past the first step in terminal, just get the bash-3.2#