You need to make a backup of the rom (in case something goes wrong) and if there are multiple possible chips visually identify which chip is in your Mac. If you don’t have the programmer hardware to flash the old rom back if something goes wrong then don’t risk it on a machine you can’t afford to break.
Do you have any reference with steps on how to make a backup of the ROM, along with steps on how to restore in case something does go wrong?
My cMP3,1 shows Intel chipset for my internal drive bays, but I'm using an OWC Accelsior S PCI card/SSD drive for my boot drive which shows up under "Generic AHCI Controller", so I'm reluctant to try the ROM Patcher.
I haven't had any luck with Mojave Patcher's APFS patch (tried it twice), but I always end up with the "boot file not found, exiting..." startup error. I had to reformat my boot drive back to HFS+ and restore from Time Machine. I did this twice 🤦♂️
So I'm thinking my only other option is to try the APFS ROM Patcher, otherwise maybe I'll just stick with HFS+
One thing I haven't seen documented clearly is the order of steps required to go from HFS+ to APFS on a cMP3,1. For example, I'm assuming I'd need to run the APFS ROM Patcher tool first, BEFORE I convert my boot drive from HFS+ to APFS, otherwise I wouldn't be able to boot and run the APFS ROM patcher. Is this a correct assumption?
I might be crazy enough to try this conversion one more time (third time's the charm?), and I'd be more willing to try it if there were clearer steps documented along with a way to reverse (backing up the ROM, restoring the ROM, etc).
Again my boot drive was recently restored to HFS+ and is running Mojave (via Mojave Patcher). If I were to try the APFS ROM Patcher, what would be the correct order of steps to follow? Something like the following?
- Back up current boot ROM using xxxxxxx (is there a tool that does this?)
- Download and run dosdude1's APFS ROM Patcher
- Assuming the computer boots up and isn't bricked, boot back into the Mojave Patcher USB drive
- Open Disk Utility and unmount the boot drive "Macintosh HD"
- With "Macintosh HD" selected, from the edit menu in Disk Utility select "Convert to APFS"
- Reboot and things should magically work? Or do I need to manually create a Preboot apfs partition?
If the APFS ROM Patcher winds up bricking my cMP3,1, how then do I restore the backed up ROM?
Thanks in advance!