MP 1,1-5,1 Mac Pro 5,1(4,1) Opencore legacy patcher, Monterey, postinstall USB stick or not?

[Stormageddon]

I have a cMP 5,1, geforce gtx760, dual tray, 64 gb ram, 2 x HDD, 1 x SSD, 1 x NVME (pcie). No bootscreen.

With a lot of sweat and doubts I managed to install Monterey on a freshly formatted HDD. Idea was just to test opencore to get the lay of the land.

My normal system is Mojave on a NVME-SSD, installed on KRYO m.2 pcie-adapter.

As my GTX760 is metal-supported but not flashed, when installing Opencore legacy from USB-stick, I had to opt for the TERMINAL-input to choose my USB-Stick EFI as the boot-disk.

After installing OCLP prompted me to let it install opencore on this Monterey-installed internal HDD. I did that. So I THINK that the EFI on that HDD would also give me boot picker – should I boot from that drive.

Now... I am at a crossroads of knowns and unknowns. As I do not have native boot screen, I cannot choose the internal HDD after my OC-EFI USB stick was removed as my Mac Pro won´t boot anything without the USB. This – I gather – is the result of the terminal command to command the computer to boot solely from that source.

When I insert the USB, I get the boot picker and can boot onto Mojave on my NVME. All is ´kinda´good.

Questions:

Can I just stick with the USB stick -boot picker for the foreseeable future?

Would this be safe?

Should I go for the internal HDD EFI instead? If I go for the internal HDD EFI instead, is terminal again the only solution available for me to redirect the Mac Pro to boot from there? -> Mount that HDD EFI and "BLESS" it? If so, can this be done in OS or only in recovery mode?

Now I have just today bought an original GT120, which should arrive in few days. This should grant me native boot screen (pressing option when starting?), would this enable me to pick my NVME to boot even WITHOUT having my USB stick inserted? It seems I got a successful OpenCore legacy patcher test-drive, but I am concerned at the moment of how much relies on this USB stick of mine... I would like my next move to be the right one to 1. not be dependent of the USB-installer and 2. have freedom to boot from where-ever I want.

 

[sfalatko]

Well one item that would be a good place to start is enabling native boot screen support for virtually any GPU.

Since you are booting off NVMe I expect you have updated your BootRom to something like 144.0.0.0. If that is the case you can dump a copy and save it as a clean archived copy (though it would be good to have a bootrom reconstruction).

Take a look at the following thread -

EnableGop: Pre-OpenCore GOP support for EFI-era iMacs and Mac Pros

You wait ten years for a driver to enable pre-boot graphics on unsupported GPUs in EFI era Macs, and then two come along at once... This post is to announce a firmware driver to enable the native Apple boot picker and early macOS boot progress bar (plus other parts of the firmware UI: target...

forums.macrumors.com

Adding enableGop to your bootrom will provide that for you.

You can use OpenCore on a USB stick - I do that with my cMP.

Others will chime in as well.

Regards,
tfalatko

 

[Stormageddon]

Thanks tfalatko! I don't think my skills – or nerves – (mostly skills though) would hold up to the challenge of enableGop. I am afraid there are just too many things that I am not even aware of not being aware of...

 

[Stormageddon]

Okay, received GT120 today. Tried it on, in x4 slot. Gtx760 is in x16 slot.

Usb with opencore legacy is inserted. No native boot screen and when I pick my Mojave to boot (from OC-boot picker), the boot freezes.

Situation as follows: terminal command to boot from usb-efi still applies.

Would it be safe to redirect booting to my Mojave-boot disks efi? Would this bring my Mac back to ”normal” state?

What would be the correct way to do that?

Might I this way be able to remove usb and test gt120 again?

I understand that in Mojave gt120 and a metal-capable GPU usually collide and freeze the booting process in any case, which seems to make this futile anyway.

My pipedream was to have native boot selection with gt120 to choose whether to load opencore or no.