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danielaaron94

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 28, 2019
15
2
Washington
About a week ago i walked outside my apartment to go to work and i saw a diamond in the rough, a Mac Pro 1.1 in good physical condition sitting near a dumpster. I didnt want to be seen taking someones "garbage" so i waited until later that night hoping it would still be there.. and it was, so i grabbed it. I quickly learned that it simply had one burned out HDD and was otherwise perfectly fine. Luckily, the boot HDD functions and so it boots into Tiger (10.4 i think?) just fine. It has x2 5150s 2.66 and 4gb RAM

After digging through forums and youtube videos, i realized i could restore this machine for a pretty reasonable price of about $60. This price (LUCKILY) bought me a NATIVE apple 5870 from craigslist (no, not a flashed version), 2x mini 6 pin to 6pin PCIe, and 16gb of second hand RAM from amazon.

I watched this video on youtube
and decided this would be the best method since i do not have another mac to install the OS on a drive. I stuck an SSD in the machine and, using Tiger, followed every step in this video to "restore" the image on the drive.

Well, Kernal panic (see attached). Almost like Pikers EFI is non existant. A few things to mention: I dont get ANY output from the 5870, and with the 7300gt i still get kernal panic when attempting to boot el capitan. I know with the 7300gt it should atleast boot. As for the RAM, Tiger SOMETIMES recognizes 16gb, however it seems like every other startup, i get a red light on the board and it is reduced to 12gb.

Ive done just about everything to include playing with the RAM, re-seating the 5870, ive re-restored the image on a regular HDD, ive installed both the 5870 and 7300 gt with the monitor plugged into nvidia (when in tiger, the PCIe configuration windows pops up and recognizes the card as an ATi 5870). But no matter what i do i get either the same kernal panic or, with the 5870 alone, no signal at all. I can safely assume two things; the 5870 is completely burned out or the RAM is in such bad condition that it wont boot El Capitan.

Unfortunately, unless anyone can help, im about to return this Mac to the dumpster, as playing around in the case as given me multiple knicks on my knuckles and patience.

I appreciate it
 

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Last edited:

danielaaron94

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 28, 2019
15
2
Washington

tsialex

Contributor
Jun 13, 2016
13,461
13,611
Thanks for this. I guess my next move is to acquire a snow leopard install disk so i can then upgrade to Lion. I am also interested in finding out if snow leopard and lion support a 5870, i am confident that they do.
To have HD 5770/5870 support you need at least 10.6.4, most Snow Leopard disks are 10.6.3, you need to update your macOS install for the GPU work correctly.
 
Last edited:

danielaaron94

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 28, 2019
15
2
Washington
To have HD 5770/5870 support you need at least 10.6.4, most Snow Leopard disks are 10.6.3, you need to update your macOS install for the GPU work correctly.

I assumed that I would atleast get a signal without 10.6. I’m going to try again tonight and see what I can come up with. Feeling more confident now! I appreciate everyone’s input.
 

Macschrauber

macrumors 68030
Dec 27, 2015
2,987
1,494
Germany
You can do the whole El Capitan process with the 7300 GPU. Should not crash - it's just slow GUI.

If you have another supported Mac the easiest method is to install it on this machine and replace both boot.efi and one Platformsupport.plist.
 
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