Is the Sonnet Tempo SATA Pro 6GB bootable on a MP5,1?

[ScottishCaptain]

Does anyone here own a Sonnet Tempo SATA pro 6GB 4-port card in a MacPro5,1?

I've got two questions relating to this card:

1) Does it support booting Windows 8 (or above) via EFI on the MacPro5,1? Sonnet's website is kinda confusing because it looks like you can use this card in a PC as well, where Windows would apparently be bootable- but they don't really mention booting Windows through this card on a Mac Pro...

2) Does the ALT-Option boot chooser work with this card? I've heard conflicting rumours that it works on the MacPro3,1 and 4,1, but not the 5,1 (which apparently hangs at a grey screen with a cursor and refuses to show the bootable volumes).

Cheers,
-SC

 

[h9826790]

Does anyone here own a Sonnet Tempo SATA pro 6GB 4-port card in a MacPro5,1?

I've got two questions relating to this card:

1) Does it support booting Windows 8 (or above) via EFI on the MacPro5,1? Sonnet's website is kinda confusing because it looks like you can use this card in a PC as well, where Windows would apparently be bootable- but they don't really mention booting Windows through this card on a Mac Pro...

2) Does the ALT-Option boot chooser work with this card? I've heard conflicting rumours that it works on the MacPro3,1 and 4,1, but not the 5,1 (which apparently hangs at a grey screen with a cursor and refuses to show the bootable volumes).

Cheers,
-SC

1) only bootable to MacOS on 5,1 but not Windows.

2) no guarantee the boot manager can work on 5,1. It can work, but very depends on drives setup. And may require few SMC / PRAM reset. The whole process is try by luck, so you better consider it doesn't work. As long as any bootable drive installed on this card, the boot manager may fail (only applicable on the current 5,1 firmware). If no boot drive installed on this card, the boot manager should work without any issue.

 

[ScottishCaptain]

Thanks for the reply!

So just to confirm- you CANNOT boot Windows off this card in *any* Mac Pro?

-SC

 

[h9826790]

Thanks for the reply!

So just to confirm- you CANNOT boot Windows off this card in *any* Mac Pro?

-SC

AFAIK, you are correct. CANNOT boot Windows on Mac Pro. I tried Windows 7, 8, 10 on my cMP with 4,1 / 5,1 firmware, never able to boot to Windows. Same as the official info.

However, I can't 100% guarantee you that's correct for any Windows version on any Mac Pro. May be Win 98 can boot on Mac Pro 1,1. I don't know, I never test it, and there is no reliable info on this matter.

I contacted Sonnet, they said that they were working on to fix the boot manager issue. However, that's more than 2 years ago. And they didn't release any fix so far.

I am not sure if that's hardware or software limitation about can't boot Windows. But I assume it's software, because some other similar card can. And they have no plan to make it Windows bootable (on Mac) at this moment.