Mac Pro HS install black screen

[tomscott1988]

Hi Guys,

Decided to take the plunge and install HS. The mac pro is a 4,1 with a firmware update to 5,1.

To upgrade to HS I had to perform a firmware update which failed 5-6 times would just boot up as usual and give me the same screen.

I put my original 5770 back in and have given it a go now its booting to a black screen and just sits there, sometimes the mouse will pop up otherwise it does nothing.

I have tried PRAM reset and also booting into single user mode and have tried this:
https://betanews.com/2016/12/15/blank-screen-cursor-macos-update-fix/

My OS is installed on a raid 0 over two velocity X2s PCI cards

Does anyone have any ideas? Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers

Tom

 

[bsbeamer]

What GPU card did you have installed when you originally installed? Was it flashed or native EFI?

Is SIP enabled or disabled?

Are those two Velocity SOLO x2's? Two Velocity DUO x2's? One of each? Assume SSDs in all slots? Any idea if the firmware on the Apricorn cards themselves was updated?

If your SSDs were "upgraded" to APFS from HFS+ (especially if adding RAID 0 on top of it) you may need to attempt to install to a "clean" drive and then try to migrate your data.

 

[tomscott1988]

I haven't got to the instal yet, so the drives are still in apple extended. Before the installer I had to run the firmware.

I ran this with my RX 580 and it would keep booting back into sierra without completing. So I put the old card in and rebooted. The apple load bar runs for 10 mins or so to a black screen.

I have 2 back up clones one of sierra from the MP and High sierra from my MacBook. Neither backup will boot up both go to the black screen.

I am assuming the firmware has failed and the machine won't boot.

 

[bsbeamer]

Guessing this is related to the 4,1>5,1 update patch/hack somehow. Which method did you use?

 

[h9826790]

I haven't got to the instal yet, so the drives are still in apple extended. Before the installer I had to run the firmware.

I ran this with my RX 580 and it would keep booting back into sierra without completing. So I put the old card in and rebooted. The apple load bar runs for 10 mins or so to a black screen.

I have 2 back up clones one of sierra from the MP and High sierra from my MacBook. Neither backup will boot up both go to the black screen.

I am assuming the firmware has failed and the machine won't boot.

If the firmware is failure, you can't even boot to single user mode. As long as you Mac can show the cursor, most likely your firmware is fine.

For firmware upgrade, Mac EFI graphic card is a requirement. That's why your Mac failed to upgrade the firmware with the RX580 (but it should not damage the old firmware).

The original 5770 should work. However, you boot from a RAID 0 volume. Which may be an invalid storage for the firmware upgrade.

If your original HDD still there, you may put it back to the Mac, boot into recovery partition, or boot from a macOS installer disc (you have to burn that by yourself). Install a macOS onto that HDD, and then perform the HS upgrade from there. In this case, you have the original GPU, original HDD, should be OK for the firmware upgrade. If you want to play safe, you may even remove all other hard drive and PCIe card. Make your Mac back to the vanilla config.

 

[tomscott1988]

I bought the machine with the firmware 4-1 to 5-1 already installed.

I have tried to boot from a separate drive with a sierra install and boot the recovery partition and it just boots to the black screen with mouse pointer.

Cant get it to do anything. Its like its still trying to do the firmware as it takes 10-15 mins to get through the progress bar.
[doublepost=1519855425][/doublepost]In single user mode it gives me
Error: Firmware unable to determine security-mode; defaulting to full-secure

 

[bsbeamer]

Do you have any firewire (or USB) devices connected to your machine? Anything that isn't fully required?

Check the FAQ's on DosDude patch site - seems to be the popular 4,1>5,1 method.

 

[tomscott1988]

No devices attached did as above and booted from another drive and left it over night.

Still on the loading screen 12 hours later

 

[h9826790]

Are you sure your 5770 is still a working card? A half failed GPU can cause stuck at loading during boot.

 

[tomscott1988]

The GPU was fine yesterday, used it to boot up to then set the firmware off.

Super annoying. Will try turning sips off and if that fails I do have an old OSX disc that I can boot to before sips see if that will install and try over again.

 

[h9826790]

The GPU was fine yesterday, used it to boot up to then set the firmware off.

Super annoying. Will try turning sips off and if that fails I do have an old OSX disc that I can boot to before sips see if that will install and try over again.

As long a the Mac EFI part is work, the firmware can be upgraded. However, if the card is partially failed (e.g. the 3D part). The card may causing macOS boot stuck (during GPU driver loading).

Anyway, it's just one possibility. If the card is good, then it's something else.

 

[tomscott1988]

Really appreciate the help.

Im currently off site so will give it some more time this evening.

I held off specifically because its my main production machine. I installed the RX 580 to find there was almost 0 improvement over my 5770 in Lightroom although the 5770 was maxing ram and processor usage.

I noticed on my 2015 Macbook that in the Lightroom preferences running HS it was using Metal in the GPU acceleration but not under sierra so thought updating may see some better performance possibly better driver support.

In hindsight a bad decision but updating the OS should not be this difficult and bricking my production machine is really an awful situation to be in.

 

[bsbeamer]

Many Adobe products on Mac still work best with CUDA, when it's available. Have a support case open with Adobe currently and they actually recommend for best performance in this order: CUDA, OpenCL, Metal, Software.

I've had issues with OpenCL and SOME Adobe plugins/effects when they are GPU accelerated (native built-in ones). Metal performance is better than software, but nowhere near CUDA when utilizing GPU accelerated products.

Have not messed around with the new Lightroom enough to make a solid recommendation for best settings. Would give other options a try if you can. RAW source files are sometimes the issue. Occasionally converting to DNG first (as a batch) does make a large performance difference.

 

[tomscott1988]

The issue is Nvidia drivers are so bad on the mac side that the AMD cards still outperform and have native support.

Its a difficult toss up between the two really. I havent tried converting to DNG so I will give that a go.

I also have a PC with:

Windows 10
i7-4790 3.6 quad
32gb ram
256gb 840 EVO
GTX 760

It absolutely eats lightroom in comparison, no slow downs etc

It may just be that its time to move on from the cMP.

 

[bsbeamer]

Lightroom was very CPU taxing in the past. Had similar performance for certain tasks on a late-2013 MBP and the 5,1. Unfortunately, the days of a 5,1 as a primary machine are limited. Waiting to see what the 7,1 will be like before making a decision on how to spend for the future.

 

[tomscott1988]

Lightroom was very CPU taxing in the past. Had similar performance for certain tasks on a late-2013 MBP and the 5,1. Unfortunately, the days of a 5,1 as a primary machine are limited. Waiting to see what the 7,1 will be like before making a decision on how to spend for the future.

Well thats the issue, when.

Could be another year 18 months. Cant see it being launched in 2018, possibly announced.

I was trying to make it last possibly another 6 months to a year with the GPU update but obviously the way it sits its a heavy paperweight. Its not awful to use its just a little sluggish so if i could get it back up and running then im happy to keep using it for the short term.

 

[tomscott1988]

I have been messing about with the mac pro all night. It seems I might be getting the HS black screen issue.

If i boot the machine and unplug the mouse I get a bluetooth mouse of trackpad set up window screen over the black screen when I plug the mouse in it goes away and im left with the black screen.

Really starting to annoy me now.

I can't reset the sip because it won't let me boot into the recovery drive and it doesn't work in single user mode.

I have tried to reset the SMC again to no avail.
[doublepost=1519952777][/doublepost]This is basically what I've got but it won't boot into safe mode either

 

[ActionableMango]

I don't necessarily trust your RAID installation nor your backups. I've seen corrupted and non-bootable backups way, way too many times. Can you boot to anything else? For example a bootable MacOS installation disc, a Bootcamp drive, a Windows installation disc, a Linux Live disc, etc? If you don't have any of that, burn a Linux Live DVD from some other computer.

The purpose for this test is to eliminate the RAID and backups as a problem (or identify them as the problem).

On a different point, are you sure the NVRAM reset is working? You should hear more than one BONG if there was a reset. Some people with the Apple slim aluminum wired keyboard, or several kinds of wireless keyboards, can't really do a NVRAM reset even though they are holding the keys down.

 

[Paul_MHPHOTO]

Hi Guys,

Decided to take the plunge and install HS. The mac pro is a 4,1 with a firmware update to 5,1.

To upgrade to HS I had to perform a firmware update which failed 5-6 times would just boot up as usual and give me the same screen.

I put my original 5770 back in and have given it a go now its booting to a black screen and just sits there, sometimes the mouse will pop up otherwise it does nothing.

I have tried PRAM reset and also booting into single user mode and have tried this:
https://betanews.com/2016/12/15/blank-screen-cursor-macos-update-fix/

My OS is installed on a raid 0 over two velocity X2s PCI cards

Does anyone have any ideas? Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers

Tom

Hey Tom,

Seen some of your posts about slow LR.. having the same sort of trouble and thinking of upgrading my GPU..

did you have any luck and did it work well for you? I have a similar Mac Pro 5,1 setup

Cheers!!!
Paul

 

[tomscott1988]

Hey Tom,

Seen some of your posts about slow LR.. having the same sort of trouble and thinking of upgrading my GPU..

did you have any luck and did it work well for you? I have a similar Mac Pro 5,1 setup

Cheers!!!
Paul

Once I got the machine up and running... Updating to HS bricked the machine... with it being a production machine I switched to my windows workstation for that time until I could put some time aside to fix it, it ended up being a nightmare but got there.

Once HS and the latest version was installed with my RX580 the machine is like night and day its more than capable now to the point that it was unusable before and now it is usable. Depends on your screen tho, im using a 27" ACD which is 2k. Above that im not sure whether the performance will be great. Also depends on the files your using, I use 5DSR, 5DMKIV and 6DMKII so 24mp-50mp and it works great with the MKIV and MKII but with the 50mp images the machine isnt quick but usable.

I have a feeling that its a multitude of things, metal being vastly improved in HS, graphics drivers being optimized and lastly the speed improvements of lightroom has breathed new life into the machine.

Its still not ideal, certain tasks still bog the machine down. Dehaze and multiple spot healing makes the machine crawl, same if I apply sharpening as a preset on import, it makes editing the image much slower. So I now do this after the fact. The rest is blazing which is great on a 10 year old machine.

If I turn off the graphics acceleration dehaze and spot healing is far quicker but the develop module adjustments are so so slow.

The take away is that I barely use dehaze anyway because I dont really like the results and I do the cloning after editing the image in photoshop anyway because you get so much more control. I then select my sharpening and chromatic aberration preset, select all images and sync them so it does it at once.

Imports and exports are also really impressive too.

Hope that helps

 

[Paul_MHPHOTO]

Once I got the machine up and running... Updating to HS bricked the machine... with it being a production machine I switched to my windows workstation for that time until I could put some time aside to fix it, it ended up being a nightmare but got there.

Once HS and the latest version was installed with my RX580 the machine is like night and day its more than capable now to the point that it was unusable before and now it is usable. Depends on your screen tho, im using a 27" ACD which is 2k. Above that im not sure whether the performance will be great. Also depends on the files your using, I use 5DSR, 5DMKIV and 6DMKII so 24mp-50mp and it works great with the MKIV and MKII but with the 50mp images the machine isnt quick but usable.

I have a feeling that its a multitude of things, metal being vastly improved in HS, graphics drivers being optimized and lastly the speed improvements of lightroom has breathed new life into the machine.

Its still not ideal, certain tasks still bog the machine down. Dehaze and multiple spot healing makes the machine crawl, same if I apply sharpening as a preset on import, it makes editing the image much slower. So I now do this after the fact. The rest is blazing which is great on a 10 year old machine.

If I turn off the graphics acceleration dehaze and spot healing is far quicker but the develop module adjustments are so so slow.

The take away is that I barely use dehaze anyway because I dont really like the results and I do the cloning after editing the image in photoshop anyway because you get so much more control. I then select my sharpening and chromatic aberration preset, select all images and sync them so it does it at once.

Imports and exports are also really impressive too.

Hope that helps

Thanks a mil Tom thats really helpful. Yep I'm shooting 5d4 and now Sony A73 too but the machine is crawling with the new LR 7.4 classic its the pits. I'm thinking of the GTX 980 Ti so hoping that and a new processor will fix my issues. We'll soon see!

 

[tomscott1988]

The problem with Nvidia is that the drivers are rubbish. Your better off buying ATI as they are supported and the drivers are pretty good.

You may find no difference vs your current card as Mac OS uses open CL and the nvidia cards regardless of their power dont handle open CL well on the mac. In windows its a different story.