MP 1,1-5,1 Mac Pro 2009 (4,1) will not boot Windows via Boot Camp

[seasurfer]

I have a bog-standard Mac Pro 2009 (4,1) with the stock dual 2.26 GHz processors and 6 GB of RAM that I purchased new in 2009. The stock Radeon GPU it came with is also installed. At one time it was my daily driver desktop machine but has since been supplanted by a MacBook Pro with M1 Max and a 2020 iMac. The last time I used the Mac Pro was in 2016 and then I put it away in my basement.

I am a retrocomputing enthusiast, and recently decided I would resurrect the Mac Pro as a retrogaming rig. As part of that I planned to set it up with two separate instances of Boot Camp, one running Windows XP, and one running Windows 7, along with installations of El Capitan and Snow Leopard. There are 4 hard disks installed in the drive bays. The idea is each OS would have it's own hard disk. I have an original Snow Leopard DVD I'm using to do the Windows XP boot camp install and using the installation of El Capitan to do the Windows 7 install.

The issue is, no matter what I do, the computer will not boot into Windows in any way, shape or form. It doesn't matter whether I create a partition on a Mac OS hard disk or give Windows its own hard disk, it simply will not boot. It will not boot from the installation CDs/DVDs I have, whether Windows XP Pro with SP3 or Windows 7 Ultimate with SP1 x64. When it tries to boot the screen goes from the usual gray startup screen to black and then it just hangs.

I've searched online for solutions but nothing so far has seemed to work. I've run Apple Hardware Test with everything passing. I replaced the BR2032 battery, reset the SMC and NVRAM, tried different installer discs (burned vs original, factory pressed) and nothing works.

I'm not sure what to do next. I am not interested in using alternate bootloaders like rEFInd, nor do I want to flash my machine to a 5,1 Mac Pro. A stock 2009 Mac Pro should be able to do stock Boot Camp and that's what I'm wanting to use.

 

[Macschrauber]

Try to reset the nvram deeply.

cmd-alt-p-r held without interruption until the box chimes 4 times.

maybe you check the firmware / NVRAM health status with the tool linked in my signature.

 

[seasurfer]

So I forgot to state that I already tried a "deep" nvram reset, letting it cycle 5 times, actually.

Running your utility gives the following status:

Firmware MP41.0081.B07
MP41, Serial from firmware: xxxxxxxxxxx
CRC32 checksums: ok
Old bootblock of MP41.0081.B04 or B03
Base_17 hardware descriptor
BootOrder: 1:Boot0080
Boot0080: Mac OS X
Boot0081: Mac OS X
BootFFFF: \System\Library\CoreServices\boot.efi
3 boots since last garbage collection, MTC counter: 26 - 29
4 (1 active) Memory Configs g (ok)         
4 (1 active) Memory Configs h (ok)         
5 (1 active) Memory Configs i (ok)         
0 Microsoft certificates (ok)
1 (1 active) BluetoothActiveControllerInfos (ok)
1 (1 active) BluetoothInternalControllerInfos (ok)
1 (1 active) NVRAM PathProperties0000 (ok)
This Mac Pro 4,1 firmware has no VSS2 store
32284 bytes free space of 65464
VSS1 (Formatted) (Healthy), found 54 variables (32 valid, 22 deleted)

 

[Macschrauber]

There is no obvious / visual problem in.

As it is a 4.1 firmware we can not see exactly if the deep nvram reset worked.

A regular nvram reset happened, thats the mtc counter with the lowest value of 26. Otherwise it is in the 1000s.


Is an extra sata controller on a PCIe card in this box? Some act nasty when it comes to booting.

Are those windows instances visible in the native boot picker when you hold the alt key during the chime?

 

[seasurfer]

Is an extra sata controller on a PCIe card in this box? Some act nasty when it comes to booting.

That's it! I had a Sonnet Tempo SATA E2P card in the computer. Removing it restored the ability of Windows to boot on the machine. Thank you for the help.

 

[Macschrauber]

That's it! I had a Sonnet Tempo SATA E2P card in the computer. Removing it restored the ability of Windows to boot on the machine. Thank you for the help.

yep, had the same effect on a customer machine and had to remove it.