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5,1 to 4,1 question

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w8ing4intelmacs

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 22, 2006
559
4
East Coast, US
I tried putting a 5,1 boot drive in a 4,1 with no success booting up (somewhat suspected).

Would upgrading the 4,1 firmware to 5,1 be sufficient to get this to work or is there a lot more involved? I'm trying to avoid installing the OS from scratch.
 
Should have been fine. When I changed from 3,1 to 5,1 (flashed 4,1) I just took the SSD out of the old MP and put it in to the new one, repaired permissions and bob became my fathers brother.

OS X is good like that, Windows on the other hand completely **** the bed :)
 
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As Inutopia said, this should just work, unless you're doing something strange. As long as the OS is supported on the machine you're moving it to (which it should) Updating the firmware should make no difference. I assume this is just a standard SATA drive with OSX installed (Snow Leopard or newer)? Maybe try holding option during boot to manually choose the boot drive?

What is it doing when you try to boot?
 
Ill try it again when I get home but it showed the apple as it booted up, the progress bar got about halfway, and then halted in what I believe was a kernel panic. I tried it twice, first with the option key to boot on the proper drive, and then with only the 5,1 boot drive installed.
 
Command + v keys at the same time I think it is to get verbose (text) boot then you will get to see where it is failing, if it is not the command then option is it.
 
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Post more details about hardware config of both computers, especially PCIe cards.
What OS version is on the drive? Did you try safe mode in a 4,1?
Unsupported (by OS version) hardware can cause that kind of issue you're experiencing.
Safe mode usually works in this case.
 
Hi everyone,
Thanks for the replies.

What I did was move all the hard drives and memory from my single CPU 5,1 to a dual CPU 4,1. It didn't work right away, and I didn't have time until this morning to troubleshoot.

It looks like the kernel panic was caused by the memory (1333MHz RDIMMs). It seems to run fine with the 1066MHz UDIMMs I have.

I'm not ready to upgrade the CPUs yet, so I'm waiting on upgrading the firmware. But out of curiosity, do you think upgrading the firmware would solve the memory compatibility problem?
 
w8ing4intelmacs said:
Hi everyone,
Thanks for the replies.

What I did was move all the hard drives and memory from my single CPU 5,1 to a dual CPU 4,1. It didn't work right away, and I didn't have time until this morning to troubleshoot.

It looks like the kernel panic was caused by the memory (1333MHz RDIMMs). It seems to run fine with the 1066MHz UDIMMs I have.

I'm not ready to upgrade the CPUs yet, so I'm waiting on upgrading the firmware. But out of curiosity, do you think upgrading the firmware would solve the memory compatibility problem?
Click to expand...

Count the chips on each set of memory you most likely have buffered and unbuffered mixed together. Those are not compatible with each other it is one type only in use at the same time. Common problem with trying to upgrade server ram mixing the incompatible types together. Hell even in my PC I can and do use the 9 chip variety but not the 10 they will fail to post, my z800 server either will do just not together.

Edit: And that assumes they are not the heat sink covered type that have even more chips than that on there it can be one hell of a mess trying to upgrade them.
 
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The RDIMM 1333 RAM should work fine in the dual 4,1, but you have to put them in the correct slots, and don't mix it with UDIMM.

And upgrade the firmware may give you better RAM speed (allow to run in 1333 if the CPU also support that speed), but won't fix the issue if it's cause by mixing RAM.
 
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