Black screen since installing bootcamp

[Kamerynn]

Hi all,

Looking to see if anyone has any ideas for this one, i've exhausted everything I can think of.

Story so far...

I have a Mac Pro 5,1 (6core, 32Gb, El Capitan) and I decided to give Boot Camp a try in the vain attempt to get a bit more gaming performance from Windows 10.
I went through the process using the Boot Camp assistant, it created the USB drive with the 5.1 software and rebooted. From there just a black screen. After a bit of research I found that there are issues with using a USB DVD drive for installing Windows (I have SSD's in the drive bay), so I changed the drives around and plugged in a SATA DVD drive. Powered up and held C to boot from DVD and up pops the windows installer and away I go installing. This all worked ok and the Boot Camp drivers installed fine.

When I rebooted I now just get a black screen again, (I have a non EFI video card btw). I tried holding ALT and have been through every combination I can guess to select the boot drive but to no avail.

So what i've tried so far but no change:
Reset the PRAM
SMC Reset
Tried an old video card from a Pro 1,1
Tried to boot from El Capitan install USB
Tried to boot from Lion install DVD

What I have found to do something:
Booting from Windows install DVD gets me the install screen so i'm confident the gfx card is still ok
Booting from Linux Mint DVD also gets me a screen and I can run that OS ok from the DVD, hardware manager shows everything is ok.
I have used the El Capitan drive from the pro and booted using it on a Mac Mini, this worked fine

So, Any ideas???? I'm at my wits end

Thanks,

Kam

 

[h9826790]

It's hard to use boot manager without the screen. From memory, there is no default startup partition, but remember the last partition. So, you try different key combination didn't means that you actually successfully try all partition.

What doesn't make sense is that PRAM reset should makes your Mac boot back to OSX on the next boot. If that's also doesn't help, I suspect your OSX partition is corrupted. However, you said that you tested the drive. So, it sounds very strange to me.

What I will do now is to remove all HDD except the the one that with OSX. And do the PRAM reset again.

 

[Kamerynn]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

I've just tried this but unfortunately it did not work. I held the key combo till I got the chime and let go, a short time later I got a another chime but still no screen.

Im confused as to why even with the old video card I still don't get a boot screen as it is a mac card all be it from a 1,1.

 

[h9826790]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

I've just tried this but unfortunately it did not work. I held the key combo till I got the chime and let go, a short time later I got a another chime but still no screen.

Im confused as to why even with the old video card I still don't get a boot screen as it is a mac card all be it from a 1,1.

That card is too old, using 32bit EFI, which doesn't fit your Mac Pro (require 64bit EFI).

 

[Kamerynn]

Ahh. OK makes sense.
I'll see if I can borrow a card from a friend and see if I get any further with that. Might not be able to get that for a few days though.
Thanks for your advice so far