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AFAIK the Radeon X1900 isn't supported under Mavericks. I suggest that you upgrade to something better. the Radeon 5770 works just fine.

On Reddit, I read a post about a guy that got it working with the Radeon x1900 installed. I'll replace it as soon as I get mavericks working (I have a 8800 GT I think I can use). Right now, I just want to confirm that Mavericks can be installed on this thing, so I can make the appropriate upgrades.
 
I just installed Mavericks on my Mac Pro 1,1 (forced to 2,1)

Tiamo's boot.efi is true genius. Everything works as it should, sleeping, iMessage, etc. I had already upgraded to a Radeon 3870, so the display wasn't a problem.

The only thing that was a pain was the poor instructions:

1) The "createinstallmedia" method recommended when you google how to make a bootable drive - doesn't work for this purpose. The files you need to replace to hack the board-id's in are buried inside DMGs that you can't edit. You must use the BaseImage + Copy Packages method.

2) Most of the links don't give a good description on how to add the board ids into OSinstall.mpkg. I ended up using xar to extract and rebuild it. I was afraid to try the hack version of OSinstall.mpkg, as I only had 10.9.2 install files.

3) The steps to create a bootable stick without createinstallmedia almost universally tell you to restore the BaseSystem.dmg to the root USB device. This resulted in freezing at the spinning star logo thing under the Apple logo (even on a modern Mac that works out of the box with Mavericks). I found a post buried somewhere that suggested creating a partition, and restoring to that partition. Worked like a charm. (And yes, it was formatted with a GUID partition table the whole time).

4) With 10.9.2, even if you replace the boot.efi's on the install media, it will still clobber it with another version after install. You'll need to replace the two boot.efi's again on your target system before booting up for the first time.
 
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The only thing that was a pain was the poor instructions

I don't think most readers of this thread would characterise the relevant instructions as 'poor.' A large number of early Mac Pro owners, myself included, seem to have benefited from said instructions without much difficulty.
 
I don't think most readers of this thread would characterise the relevant instructions as 'poor.' A large number of early Mac Pro owners, myself included, seem to have benefited from said instructions without much difficulty.

I would tend to agree, but modify it by saying that upgrading a Mac Pro 2006/7 to 10.9.whatever is a skill, not a right.

If anyone thought that those instructions were tricky, should have been through the Chameleon boot loader era - it would have been like comparing a typhoon to a brisk breeze :p

I will freely admit that I have developed none of this, but what I have done is heavily test most of this.

Simply put, I am a simple man who can break down complex procedures into simple 'blocks' and from thence it becomes a series of many short hops - if one of these procedures seems overly complex, you're either over thinking it, or heading down a blind alley - ie you're doing something you don't need to do.

Else there's SFoTT…. ;)
 
If anyone thought that those instructions were tricky, should have been through the Chameleon boot loader era - it would have been like comparing a typhoon to a brisk breeze :p

I'm one of those early Chameleon adopters. As a matter of fact, when I first saw Tiamo's boot.efi, I had been running Mavericks on my 2006 Mac Pro for several weeks or a few months on Chameleon. Because of that, the only thing I had to do was copy the modified boot.efi on top of Mavericks one in the two relevant folders, reset PRAM, boot natively to Mavericks and bless the Mavericks disk. Everything went smooth. I didn't bother creating a new installer or anything like that. Naturally, I had a valid graphics card ever since Lion's days.
 
May be of interest but I have the 5770 in my Mac Pro connected to the same Dell display with both DVI and VGA (using a DVI-VGA adaptor) cables. I use the DVI input for day-to-day tasks and on the occasion I need to see the boot screen I switch to the VGA input on the display.
 
I'm one of those early Chameleon adopters. As a matter of fact, when I first saw Tiamo's boot.efi, I had been running Mavericks on my 2006 Mac Pro for several weeks or a few months on Chameleon. Because of that, the only thing I had to do was copy the modified boot.efi on top of Mavericks one in the two relevant folders, reset PRAM, boot natively to Mavericks and bless the Mavericks disk. Everything went smooth. I didn't bother creating a new installer or anything like that. Naturally, I had a valid graphics card ever since Lion's days.
That`s what I did, too. And got Maverick running flawlessly - but only for 1 day.
Then the disk stopped booting. I replaced boot.efi twice - nothing...(http://cdn.macrumors.com/vb/images/smilies/frown.gif

Can anybody help?

Thx a lot!
 
I just installed Mavericks on my Mac Pro 1,1 (forced to 2,1)

Tiamo's boot.efi is true genius. Everything works as it should, sleeping, iMessage, etc. I had already upgraded to a Radeon 3870, so the display wasn't a problem.

The only thing that was a pain was the poor instructions:

1) The "createinstallmedia" method recommended when you google how to make a bootable drive - doesn't work for this purpose. The files you need to replace to hack the board-id's in are buried inside DMGs that you can't edit. You must use the BaseImage + Copy Packages method.

2) Most of the links don't give a good description on how to add the board ids into OSinstall.mpkg. I ended up using xar to extract and rebuild it. I was afraid to try the hack version of OSinstall.mpkg, as I only had 10.9.2 install files.

3) The steps to create a bootable stick without createinstallmedia almost universally tell you to restore the BaseSystem.dmg to the root USB device. This resulted in freezing at the spinning star logo thing under the Apple logo (even on a modern Mac that works out of the box with Mavericks). I found a post buried somewhere that suggested creating a partition, and restoring to that partition. Worked like a charm. (And yes, it was formatted with a GUID partition table the whole time).

4) With 10.9.2, even if you replace the boot.efi's on the install media, it will still clobber it with another version after install. You'll need to replace the two boot.efi's again on your target system before booting up for the first time.

Google SFOTT (Sixty Four On Thirty Two). Its a script to create the Mavericks Install Media for Mac's with 64bit CPUs & 32bit EFIs. It uses Tiamo's boot.efi. But simplifies the creation of the install media drastically. I had trouble creating the install media at first. But then used SFOTT and had no issues.
 
Then the disk stopped booting. I replaced boot.efi twice - nothing...
Can anybody help?

Can't you be more specific? I assume the disk is not broken, at least not entirely. How were you able to write to it, considering it doesn't boot? Did you use another OS to access the disk? If it's, say, Snow Leopard or Lion, can you see if Disk Utility can repair your Mavericks disk? In the worst case scenario, and considering your disk isn't physically damaged, perhaps a full reinstall of Mavericks might be in place.
 
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Did you use another OS to access the disk?

Yes, I am accessing it with a Lion System, Disk Repair says: The disk is ok, repaired permissions, the Mavericks disk shows up when starting with pushed alt Tab, the apple shows up, the wheel spins…for 30sec and then …it reboots :(
Time to start all over again, I think, but thanks a lot for the fast reply!!
 
Hi,

Mac Pro 2.1 (1.1 -> 2.1) 10.9.3 - 13D12

Update to 13D28, Tiamo and tobyg are working well and GTX 650 also.

:)
 
Okay, I tried using SFOTT, that didn't work either! One thing I did notice is that when SFOTT was doing it's magic, it said that my USB drive might not be bootable. Am I supposed to format it prior to using SFOTT? If so, which volume format do I use (i.e. extended, journaled, etc.)? Or maybe I should use a different USB device? I got a continuously spinny grey screen with the Apple on it.

At this rate, I'll probably just pick up another SATA drive, install to the drive directly using my Macbook Pro (which does support Mavericks), change the boot.efi and stick it back in the Mac Pro. I heard this works, so I'm trying it tomorrow once the PC shops are open.

Shogun.

EDIT: Wait, do I have to manually change the boot.efi files again? If so, is that what I forgot?
 
Okay, one final problem. I re-tried using SFOTT, and now I'm getting "Still waiting for root device" over and over again. What does THAT mean? :confused:

Shogun.
 
Wanted to report that I updated my MP 2,1 with FusionDrive to 10.9.2 using software update. After it failed to reboot, I shut it down and restarted it in Firewire target mode, connected it to a macbook and copied the boot.efi file over, and it's back online with no problem. I'm using a GTX 660.
 
Wanted to report that I updated my MP 2,1 with FusionDrive to 10.9.2 using software update. After it failed to reboot, I shut it down and restarted it in Firewire target mode, connected it to a macbook and copied the boot.efi file over, and it's back online with no problem. I'm using a GTX 660.

Take a look at this post, install the app, and keep the boot.efi updated across updates.

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/18829695/
 
Take a look at this post, install the app, and keep the boot.efi updated across updates.

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/18829695/

This does not work with Fusion drives.

Had a question about editing the script to work on a FusionDrive, but got no responses... So I did it manually.

Just looking at this again. Would tobyg's script, edited to work on a Fusion Drive, look like this? And I would substitute 'Apple_Boot Boot OS X' with the name of my Fusion Drive? Thanks for your help.

<string>trap "for part in $(diskutil list | grep 'Apple_Boot Boot OS X' | awk '{print $8}') ; do [ ! -d /tmp/$part ] && mkdir /tmp/$part ; diskutil mount -mountPoint /tmp/$part /dev/$part &>/dev/null || continue ; find /tmp/$part/ -type f -name boot.efi -exec cp /usr/standalone/i386/boot.efi.tiamo {} \; 2>/dev/null; diskutil umount /tmp/$part &>/dev/null; done" SIGINT SIGTERM SIGHUP; sleep 999999 & wait $!</string>
 
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Okay, now it works. I put the boot.efi in the wrong folders. Even though it was obvious, I got confused and put the boot.efi on the actual HDD, and not the drive I was booting from.

Now to upgrade the video card. The Radeon X1900 is actually defeating the purpouse for me. :)

Thanks Tiamo senpai!

Shogun
 
I managed to install it in a late 2006 macbook 2,1 which is pretty awesome. Followed all the (dispersed) instructions and it worked on first attempt using an USB.
Three issues so far:
1) no audio (i tried the two fixes described in GUIDE.txt, no luck)
2) no sleeping ( now i got a macbook that never sleeps ;) ) - sleeping goes to a black screen with mouse pointer visible - clicking a key goes to logon screen
3) some artefacts on certain visual effects (icon glowing and progress bars shows some 'flickering')
The system is somewhat slower that my previous osx 10.6.8, but i think it's natural. all applications i tried ran without any issues.

many many many thanks tiamo!
 
I managed to install it in a late 2006 macbook 2,1 which is pretty awesome. Followed all the (dispersed) instructions and it worked on first attempt using an USB.
Three issues so far:
1) no audio (i tried the two fixes described in GUIDE.txt, no luck)
2) no sleeping ( now i got a macbook that never sleeps ;) ) - sleeping goes to a black screen with mouse pointer visible - clicking a key goes to logon screen
3) some artefacts on certain visual effects (icon glowing and progress bars shows some 'flickering')
The system is somewhat slower that my previous osx 10.6.8, but i think it's natural. all applications i tried ran without any issues.

many many many thanks tiamo!

I repeat again, this thread is for Mac Pros running mavericks, not Macbooks, your MacBook is 64 bit capable WITHOUT Tiamo's boot loader - the reasons that it is inadvisable to force install and then run Mountain Lion or Mavericks are that there are no 64 bit graphics drivers, therefore no graphics acceleration (you noted your system appears to run slowly) and there are issues with sleep and sound - as you also noted.

There are better solutions for MacBooks being developed in the MacBook forum by HackerWayne et al, take a look there.
 
I repeat again, this thread is for Mac Pros running mavericks, not Macbooks, your MacBook is 64 bit capable WITHOUT Tiamo's boot loader - the reasons that it is inadvisable to force install and then run Mountain Lion or Mavericks are that there are no 64 bit graphics drivers, therefore no graphics acceleration (you noted your system appears to run slowly) and there are issues with sleep and sound - as you also noted.

There are better solutions for MacBooks being developed in the MacBook forum by HackerWayne et al, take a look there.

Thanks for the correction Roger. After attempting several other solutions without any success I was so impressed by Tiamo awesome work (and result) that I skipped most of the (current) 42 pages of this thread. I'm an absolute newbie here and I'm glad you're pointing me even better alternatives.

Thanks again to you both!
 
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