Mac Pro 2,1 and OS X Mavericks

[NHP]

MacPro 1 1/2 1 10.9 install

Hey Guys,

I've been wrestling with installing 10.9 on a MacPro 1 1. Awhile ago I upgraded the CPUs and if I remember right flashed the machine to make it a "MP 2 1". It seems like any way that I try to install 10.9 I can't make it work.

I've tried installing via target disk mode and replacing the boot.efi which seems the simplest. I restarted and held the option key to select the boot drive and the machine just starts flashing a folder with a question mark. and never loads the OS.

I created a Mavericks install USB following the Tiamo's steps. The machine would boot to a black screen and give the "still looking for root device" message.

Which led me to using the SFOTT script with the same USB stick. SFOTT worked but the machine seems stuck on the gray apple screen with the spinner.

Could it be the USB stick or something with the machine?

I am installing SFOTT on a portable USB drive to see if I have better results.

MacPro 21
ATI 5770
Seagate Barracuda 1 TB system drive
12GB Ram (I think)
2.26 Dual Quads

Thanks

 

[NHP]

It's working now. It looks like the USB stick was the problem.

Thanks to the community for figuring this out and posting the tools to do it!

 

[Cadwallader]

Tiamo hack test

Hello,

First post here, but I've been following what's happening here for a while. I would like to start by thanking everyone who's been working on this project, you guys did an amazing job.

Now, a little about me, I'm working as head technician in a Mac specialized computer store, which gives me access to a wide array of machines, and since I got a working version of the hacked 10.9, I've been trying it on pretty much every 64bit mac I could get my hands on, and here are the results:

LAPTOPS:

Macbook Air 1,1: no boot

Macbook 2,1: boot ok, VRAM 6mb, video issues
Macbook 4,1: no boot

Macbook pro 2,1: boot ok, VRAM 6mb, video issues


DESKTOPS:

Imac 5,1: boot ok, VRAM 5mb, video issues
Imac 5,2: boot ok, VRAM 7mb, video issues
Imac 6,1: boot ok, VRAM 9mb, video issues

Mac Mini 2,1: boot ok, VRAM 6mb, video issues

Xserve 1,1: boot ok, VRAM 6mb, video issues on Radeon X1300
boot ok, no side effect on HD 2600 XT


GPUs in Mac Pro 1,1:
HD 2600 XT: boot ok (no surprise there)
8800 GT: boot ok (no surprise either)
HD 5870: boot ok, works fine
7300 GT: boot ok, VRAM 5Mb, video issues (Thanks toke lahti )
Quadro FX 4500: boot ok, VRAM 5Mb, video issues
Radeon HD 6670 (PC): no boot screen, works fine
Asus GT 210 (PC): no boot screen, works fine



The only 2 machines so far that won't boot (Macbook Air 1,1 and Macbook 4,1) have in common the X3100 GMA, so I believe that this GPU is a big NO! for Mavericks. Therefore I assume that the Macbook 3,1 will do the same thing, but I will confirm as soon as I get my hands on one...

I will update this list if I can try the hack on other machines or GPUs. I doubt I will be able to find an Xserve, but you never know...
As for the macbook 3,1, it should be pretty easy, and the remaining original GPUs for Mac Pro 1,1 (7300GT and X1900XT) should be possible as well, though I seem to remember the 7300GT has already been documented here as booting, but with low VRAM and video issues...


I also have tried the same Tiamo hack on the 10.10 Yosemite developer preview on a Mac Pro 1,1 with HD2600XT, it sees it as bootable and tries to boot, but gets stuck on the spinning wheel forever.
So, it looks like it's close to booting, but there obviously are a few things that prevent the boot so far, though it gives me hope that in time it will be possible to get 10.10 running on the Mac Pro 1,1.


I hope this data will be helpful to some people around here.
If you have any questions or requests, let me know, I'll do my best to answer them, that's the least I can do to thank the community.

Cadwallader.

 

[PeterHolbrook]

'Nuff said.

You got that one right.

 

[toke lahti]

2. Can I install recovery partition (to get Find My Mac working, etc.) afterwards with SFOTT or otherwise?

Found "an app for that": http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-restore-an-os-x-recovery-partition/

Imac 5,1: boot ok, VRAM 5mb, video issues
Imac 5,2: boot ok, VRAM 7mb, video issues
Imac 6,1: boot ok, VRAM 9mb, video issues

Mac Mini 2,1: boot ok, VRAM 6mb, video issues

Macbook Air 1,1: no boot

Macbook 2,1: boot ok, VRAM 6mb, video issues
Macbook 4,1: no boot

Macbook pro 2,1: boot ok, VRAM 6mb, video issues

GPUs in Mac Pro 1,1:
HD2600XT: boot ok (no surprise there)
8800 GT: boot ok (no surprise either)
Quadro FX 4500: boot ok, VRAM 5Mb, video issues

As for the macbook 3,1, it should be pretty easy, and the remaining original GPUs for Mac Pro 1,1 (7300GT and X1900XT) should be possible as well, though I seem to remember the 7300GT has already been documented here as booting, but with low VRAM and video issues...

Nice!
Damn, I'm so invisible. Check #1342.
I think it's pretty simple that those cards that does not have 64bit drivers don't work (without issues) in 10.8 onwards. Seems to be that osx has some "generic" driver for these cards, but like we have noticed, it has barely no VRAM in use and has issues when something more complicated is needed from them. I watched some soccer with 7300gt with local (from Finnish national public service broadcasting) video stream. In windowed mode it had a steady flickering, full screen was okay, but if I tried to do anything like adjusting volume, move window, I was logged out to mac's login screen. (driver crashed?)
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5942?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
What's supported by Apple, have 64bit drivers.
There are lists ( http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/HCL_10.9.0#Graphics_Cards ), but I haven't still found a list that has both 32bit EFI and 64bit drivers listed. I still think this is what I need to look for (MP1,1 Boot screen & single slot & compablity with 10.6 and 10.9 & works well in 10.9 with gtx760).
I'm wondering that some cards would work with "near identical" model's drivers. I still haven't had enough time to figure out all about injecting, modified rome, etc.
Maybe people in netkas' forum will tell some answers...

EDIT:
Btw, my 7300gt had a fixed resolution 1280x1024 in Mav. Maybe because that "generic" driver can't pull EDID information, so maybe Apple's engineers thought that driver is provided just for emergencies...

 

[axier]

I'm still on 10.9.3 (Mac Pro 1,1 with Radeon HD 5770) but have had problems with my second monitor not being recognised on start up or wake from sleep in Mavericks - though it was better in 10.9.2. My workaround is to go into displays preferences and select "mirror displays" which seems to wake up the connection to the second monitor, then when I switch this off I get proper dual display functionality. HTH

The problem is that it does not recognize the second monitor. And going into preferences screen gives me no option. Only appears my HD Display monitor with the options "Monitor, Color and Options"

 

[joebrothehobo]

Black boot screen

Hello all,

I have been following this guide and have run into some difficulty and was wondering if anyone could help me. I am running the original mac pro 1,1 with all of the original parts and what not. I created a bootable usb drive from a 10.9.1 disk, modified both InstallableMachines.plist and OSinstall.MKPG as specified, i replaced the boot.efi in the two locations specified in the guide.

Now when I try and boot up the mac pro, I hold down the alt key until I am given a choice of which drive to boot from. I choose my flash drive and then it goes to a black screen with what looks like an underscore near the middle of the screen and that's it. After ~10 seconds or so, it reboots and does it all again.

This happens both when I try and boot with the USB and with the regulars HDD. Any suggestions or ideas on what I might have done wrong?

 

[toke lahti]

Something new:
I suddenly realized that I never tried mp1,1&10.9.4:gtx760+7300gt combination with nVidia's own drivers.
Looks like this is working better, but not quite perfectly:
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT:

Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT
Type: GPU
Bus: PCIe
Slot: Slot-3
PCIe Lane Width: x4
VRAM (Total): 11 MB
Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de)
Device ID: 0x0393
Revision ID: 0x00a1
ROM Revision: 3008
Displays:
Display:
Resolution: 1920 x 1440
Pixel Depth: 32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes

Driver is "NVIDIA Web Driver: 334.01.02f02"

So, VRAM got up from 5MB to 11MB and resolution from 1280x1024 to 1920x1440. Resolution change might also be because I booted earlier to 10.6 with same monitor & 7300gt.

If nobody don't know if anybody have asked straight from nVidia if they could add "real" support for 7300gt to 10.9 with their their drivers, I'm going to ask myself...

 

[Earl Urly]

nVidia would have to hire programmers to rewrite drivers for a product they no longer sell and would only be useful to a handful of enthusiasts. NFW that would ever happen, they'd make no money off of it.

You're better off hoping someone with time on their hands rewrites the drivers from scratch on their own dime.

 

[toke lahti]

nVidia would have to hire programmers to rewrite drivers for a product they no longer sell and would only be useful to a handful of enthusiasts. NFW that would ever happen, they'd make no money off of it.

You're better off hoping someone with time on their hands rewrites the drivers from scratch on their own dime.

Maybe, maybe not. Drivers could be 99% compatible already, just waiting for one tweak. There's also a chance that nVidia hasn't even looked how the drivers would work, since there's no official compatibility for 7300gt from Apple. nVidia might just have to enable drivers to be used by 7300gt.

So far nVidia's drivers work even worse than Apple's. Checked it with sd-resolution flash video tv-feed last night. Frame rates are lower, but it could also be because there were much higher resolution for monitor, than in my test before this.

 

[mpoplaw]

Just reporting that I applied the 10.9.4 update directly from the App Store on a 10.9.3 Mac Pro 1,1 w/ Flashed ATI HD 5770. Rebooted twice without any problems.

 

[mprat0127]

GEForce GT 610 Not Working with Dual Displays

So I spent the last couple days working to update my MacPro 2,1 from 10.7 to 10.9.4. Great work Tiamo and OEM for the fixes. Yesterday I finally got updated all the way and 10.9.4 is running great.

However, I had the ATI X1900 XT and soon realized that this video card was not supported now that I had updated(Yeah, guess I should have read all the comments). So I ran out to pick up a new card that would work for now.

I have Dual 30" Apple Cinema Diplays and knew I needed the Dual Link DVI. The only video card I saw that I thought would support the Dual ACD was the Nvidia GEForce GT610. Bought it, installed it, and everything booted up with both displays working, but only one was at full resoltion, the other at 1200x....

Anyone have any ideas why this might be?

Thanks in advance

 

[tangles]

10.9.4 installed on 2006 Xserve!

I installed 10.9.1 to an SSD where the optical drive originally was.

She booted up fine, even with the X1300 mezzanine in place!

I then installed the combo update to 10.9.4 and manually swapped out the boot32 file again. All good.

Admittedly some apps arent' happy with this GPU, but I'll be ripping it out once it goes back in the rack as ScreenSharing.app simply dies with the GPU in place.

I've found a way to get launchctl to copy the boot32 file at each shutdown/restart by catching the SIGTERM, but the problem is the chflags uchg command as it requires user intervention of having to confirm with the letter "y".

man pages of chflags doesn't seem to have an option to auto=yes either.

Anyone else happen to know how to get around this so we can create a launchdaemon?

 

[tobyg]

I installed 10.9.1 to an SSD where the optical drive originally was.

She booted up fine, even with the X1300 mezzanine in place!

I then installed the combo update to 10.9.4 and manually swapped out the boot32 file again. All good.

Admittedly some apps arent' happy with this GPU, but I'll be ripping it out once it goes back in the rack as ScreenSharing.app simply dies with the GPU in place.

I've found a way to get launchctl to copy the boot32 file at each shutdown/restart by catching the SIGTERM, but the problem is the chflags uchg command as it requires user intervention of having to confirm with the letter "y".

man pages of chflags doesn't seem to have an option to auto=yes either.

Anyone else happen to know how to get around this so we can create a launchdaemon?

Uhm, search the thread for posts by me. I already posted a package to do this.

But warning, it doesn't work with raid or fusion drives. And I haven't had time to fix that.

 

[eyseman]

USB Problems since 10.9.3

Hi

I am experiencing some USB issues since updating my machine.
Until 10.9.2 I had no issues at all. After 10.9.3 (using tobyg's boot.efi) I am facing USB issues. My front usb connectors are not recognized anymore. Furthermore, if I unplug a USB device from the back connectors (e.g. mouse) and plug it in again, it is not recognized any more.

Today, I upgraded the machine to 10.9.4. Unfortunately, the issue is still there.
Any ideas?

Thanx!

Best,
eyseman

 

[haralds]

Hi

I am experiencing some USB issues since updating my machine.
Until 10.9.2 I had no issues at all. After 10.9.3 (using tobyg's boot.efi) I am facing USB issues. My front usb connectors are not recognized anymore. Furthermore, if I unplug a USB device from the back connectors (e.g. mouse) and plug it in again, it is not recognized any more.

Today, I upgraded the machine to 10.9.4. Unfortunately, the issue is still there.
Any ideas?

Thanx!

Best,
eyseman

I am using a CarbonCopy backup to a virtual or real partition that I keep updated - especially before updating the system. I can also boot from Lion on this system, which makes it easy to restore or fix Mavericks. I have seen a number of times that when I use ComboUpdates, problems may result. Rolling back and then trying another incremental update resolved the issue.
It is clearly a result of Apple not testing this configuration, function with this hardware is not guaranteed.

 

[Chung123]

Just reporting that I applied the 10.9.4 update directly from the App Store on a 10.9.3 Mac Pro 1,1 w/ Flashed ATI HD 5770. Rebooted twice without any problems.

Confirmed. I also had no issues installing the 10.9.4 directly from the App Store this morning.

 

[tangles]

Uhm, search the thread for posts by me. I already posted a package to do this.

But warning, it doesn't work with raid or fusion drives. And I haven't had time to fix that.

thank you tobyg, tested your efforts by updating from 10.9.1 to 10.9.4 via the combo and all went well.

 

[Cadwallader]

UPDATE of my previous post (https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/19321681/)

I had the opportunity to test the hack on a 2006 Xserve, it boots, but as expected, the X1300 GPU is not happy and shows low VRAM. I threw in a 2600 XT GPU in the PCIe slot, and it worked like a charm.

So it seems to be fully functional on the Xserve provided you give it a compatible GPU, just like on the mac pro 1,1. The problem here is that you can only put a small graphics card in the Xserve, as there is only one PCIe port available (and a slow one at that, 8x), and no port for extra power.

The options are therefore more limited, but the hack is still viable. One could throw in for example a cheap Asus GT 210, that won't give the boot screen, of course (but you have it on the X1300) and run Mavericks on the Xserve flawlessly.

 

[star-affinity]

Trouble getting Mac Pro 1,1 with Radeon HD 4890 to boot – worked before

Starting from scratch, this is what I did:

1. Connected SSD to use for the installation externaly via USB to MacBook Pro 13" from 2012 and ran the Mavericks 10.9.4 installer and created a user acount.

2. Restarted from the internal drive of the MacBook Pro.

3. Replaced the two boot.efi files with the modified ones.

4. Installed two modifies ATI Kernel Extensions (using Kext Wizard) for the "PC" ATI Radeon HD4890 card to work.

4. Repaired Permissions and cleared Kernel caches.

5. Removed (merged) "EFI" partition using "diskutil" command in the Terminal to avoid the Mac Pro trying to start from that.

5. Connected the drive to Mac Pro via USB to SATA adapter and tried to boot up.

Still no go! The Mac Pro seems to detect the drive (I can see the LED on the adapter indicates that it's being read from) but the Mac Pro fans just stay loud and the display stays black.

The thing is – I had it working on this exact setup just the other day, but I mistakenly screwed up the working OS X installation, so therefore I want to redo it. Thought it'd go quick since I've done it a couple of times now, but no... Something is different all of a sudden.

Any ideas?

 

[masterss]

I've been wrestling with installing 10.9 on a MacPro 1 1. Awhile ago I upgraded the CPUs and if I remember right flashed the machine to make it a "MP 2 1". It seems like any way that I try to install 10.9 I can't make it work.

I've tried installing via target disk mode and replacing the boot.efi which seems the simplest. I restarted and held the option key to select the boot drive and the machine just starts flashing a folder with a question mark. and never loads the OS.

I created a Mavericks install USB following the Tiamo's steps. The machine would boot to a black screen and give the "still looking for root device" message.

Which led me to using the SFOTT script with the same USB stick. SFOTT worked but the machine seems stuck on the gray apple screen with the spinner.

Exactly the same situation here. A different USB Drive also did not help (tried 3 of them an even a spare SATA drive). Does anyone have any ideas?
Thank you.

 

[star-affinity]

Hello all,

I have been following this guide and have run into some difficulty and was wondering if anyone could help me. I am running the original mac pro 1,1 with all of the original parts and what not. I created a bootable usb drive from a 10.9.1 disk, modified both InstallableMachines.plist and OSinstall.MKPG as specified, i replaced the boot.efi in the two locations specified in the guide.

Now when I try and boot up the mac pro, I hold down the alt key until I am given a choice of which drive to boot from. I choose my flash drive and then it goes to a black screen with what looks like an underscore near the middle of the screen and that's it. After ~10 seconds or so, it reboots and does it all again.

This happens both when I try and boot with the USB and with the regulars HDD. Any suggestions or ideas on what I might have done wrong?

What graphics card do you have? You say it's an "original one" and they are not supported. You need a newer (supported) one.

 

[sarthak]

UPDATE:
- Followed a guide to create USB manually.
- Replaced the GT 630 with the original 7300GT for the installation and initial boot.
- Reinstalled the GT 630 post-install.
- Mavericks works great, couldn't believe all the stuff missed out on by being stuck on Lion.



UPDATE 2:
-> Updated to 10.9.4.
-> Put the drive in an enclosure.
-> Used TiamoMacProFix.pkg on the SSD.
-> Deleted the locked boot.efi file in CoreServices and copied over the modified boot.efi
WORKS GREAT!

I followed the SFOTT guide to create a SFOTT USB. Tried it with 10.9 and 10.9.4 but I couldn't get it to boot (stuck at BLACK SCREEN).

SFOTT 1.4.x in termal shows a lot of "no directory or file found" - not sure if that is normal. The 8GB USB has 6.5GB of free space, so I do not think the installer is working.

I am using a GT 630 2GB card (no EFI). I also have the original 7300GT but that's incompatible.

 

[Etienne000]

I just bought a Mac Pro 1.1 and 10.9.4 runs smoothly.

I'm waiting two x5355 and i already installed 10Gb of ram and a GT640 which runs very well. My totally upgraded Mac Pro will cost less than €300. I think it's a good deal

I hope that Tiamo will make a Yosemite compatible version of Boot.efi, that would be very good.

If you can hear me Tiamo

 

[Ummie]

Uhm, search the thread for posts by me. I already posted a package to do this.

But warning, it doesn't work with raid or fusion drives. And I haven't had time to fix that.

Hey Tobyg,

Thanks for putting this up but I'm not quite sure how to do it.
I have a Mac Pro 2,1 and I (finally) got 10.9 installed on it (via USB). I upgraded directly to 10.9.4 from app store then appllied your script before I rebooted. It seemed to work but the next day went into grey screen.
Can you post a step by step?

thanks man