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MP 1,1-5,1 MacPro5,1: What you have to do to upgrade to Mojave (10.13/10.14 BootROM upgrades instructions thread)
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I agree tsialex deserves a big thanks for his support.
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What is the major differences of installing Mojave and not keeping High Sierra? I mean I now upgraded my Mac Pro 5.1 to High Sierra and installed the Sapphire pulse 580 rx in it. Is it okay to install Mojave now or there will be problems? or I should wait until the BT4.2 and Wifi AC kit which I bought last week to arrive and install them before upgrading to Mojave?
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What is the major differences of installing Mojave and not keeping High Sierra? I mean I now upgraded my Mac Pro 5.1 to High Sierra and installed the Sapphire pulse 580 rx in it. Is it okay to install Mojave now or there will be problems? or I should wait until the BT4.2 and Wifi AC kit which I bought last week to arrive and install them before upgrading to Mojave?
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Thanks Lou.
I installed a Samsung 970 EVO in PCIe slot #3 (seeing read/write speeds around 1,400MB/s! Not the fastest, but still 10x faster than the Raptor 10k HDD on which the current OS is running.)
I was able to clone the OS to it, however it won't boot from the SSD after I select that drive in System Preferences / Startup Disk. I select the drive, restart, it hangs on a gray screen for 10 or 15 seconds, then boots into the OS on the HDD. I can hear the drive working so I know it's booting into the HDD, not the SSD.
I assume this will be fixed once I update the bootROM? It's currently MP51.0089.B00. I'm waiting for the new GPU to arrive to perform the update.
I installed a Samsung 970 EVO in PCIe slot #3 (seeing read/write speeds around 1,400MB/s! Not the fastest, but still 10x faster than the Raptor 10k HDD on which the current OS is running.)
I was able to clone the OS to it, however it won't boot from the SSD after I select that drive in System Preferences / Startup Disk. I select the drive, restart, it hangs on a gray screen for 10 or 15 seconds, then boots into the OS on the HDD. I can hear the drive working so I know it's booting into the HDD, not the SSD.
I assume this will be fixed once I update the bootROM? It's currently MP51.0089.B00. I'm waiting for the new GPU to arrive to perform the update.
I'm a little surprised you got this far. Update to the latest BootROM. See the sticky thread on this at the top - @tsialex keeps an updated table with improvements for each release.
Yup. It updated to MP51.0089.B00 when I followed the instructions in @tsialex's first post of this thread, about 1/3 of the way down, under the heading "If you have a earlier than MP51.0089.B00 BootROM version, these are the steps to upgrade your BootROM to have Mojave support:"
Thanks. Per my earlier post (#1,648) and #1,653 I'm waiting for the Metal GPU to arrive, then I'll update to (hopefully) 144.0.0.0.0.
edit; Just realized I missed this in the OP; (Red bold mine.)
- PCIe drives as external drives:
This is off-topic but since people ask, I added it here.
All types of PCIe drives (SATA, SAS, AHCI, NVMe, M.2, U.2, RAID arrays, etc) are external to the Mac Pro firmware, only drives connected to the six native SATA ports of the Mac Pro southbridge are internal to the BootROM.
PCIe drives are bootable, exactly as the internal ones.
-So that answers my question about whether or not it will be bootable with the next update.
Thanks!
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I've now erased the Hard drives and installed High Sierra on one of the two drives and it's working well. And upgraded my BootROM to 144.0.0.0.0. And I have installed also the Sapphire Radeon RX 580 and it is recognised. Now I placed my 970 EVO Plus ssd (production date 26/02/2020) in my PCI-e ssd card. I want now to use this new EVO plus as my macOS drive, do I use super duper to copy the macOS to the EVO SSD then erase the normal Harddrive? And does using it in a specific slot makes it faster?
Yes.
Probably not. I can't seem to find - not that I'm looking THAT hard - what you said you had for a PCIe adapter. But if it holds only one NVMe, or didn't cost very much, the it doesn't matter what slot you put it in. 1400-ish MBps is about the may you will get. If you want faster you will need an adapter with switching capability. And maybe more SSDs.
FWIW; I tried mine in the x16 slot (#2) and it only produced about 725MB/s read/write. I switched it to the x4 slot (#3) and got about 1450MB/s read and 1500MB/s write.
Any reason not to use the built-in Restore function in Disk Utility to clone it? What advantage is there to using apps like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner? I used DU for mine on a previous MP and it seems to work fine.
In general, I don't know if there are any. There are several ways to restore. I'm partial to CCC, and when appropropriate Time Machine. YMMV.
I just installed mine in slot#4 and I get around 1400MB/s write and 1500MB/s read. Do you think this is the best I can get? My SSD is EVO Plus 970 and my PCIe adapter is this one https://www.startech.com/se/HDD/Adaptrar/pci-express-m2-pcie-ssd-adapter~PEX4M2E1
So I have followed these steps exactly and upgrade both the CPU and GPU to the Sapphire Raddeon Pulse RX580 but have become completely stuck. When I come to install Mojave I get this exact error. "macOS could not be installed on your computer. Unknown error -110"
These are the specs:
Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro5,1
Processor Name: 6-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 3.06 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 6
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 12 MB
Memory: 16 GB
Boot ROM Version: 144.0.0.0.0
SMC Version (system): 1.39f11
SMC Version (processor tray): 1.39f11
Any ideas where I might be going wrong?
These are the specs:
Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro5,1
Processor Name: 6-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 3.06 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 6
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 12 MB
Memory: 16 GB
Boot ROM Version: 144.0.0.0.0
SMC Version (system): 1.39f11
SMC Version (processor tray): 1.39f11
Any ideas where I might be going wrong?
Older installer, downloaded before October 24 when the certificates expired? Download it again.
Check the if system date is correct before trying again.
Thanks for that. I went to the App Store a re-downloaded it but I still got the same error message when installing. It goes through the first stage where it does the first restart and then goes to that error message.
The system date and time is correct.
Check if any of your disks have SMART showing problems, DriveDX has a 14 day trial version, test the RAM with a full AHT test, reset the NVRAM 3-times sequentially.
Something is corrupting your install. Another thing to try is to do a clean install to another disk. Fully erase the disk first.
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I thought I'd note for anyone else doing the firmware update; The upgrade to 144.0.0.0.0 was a multi-step process for me. I already had High Sierra installed via the automatic updates, but the firmware was never updated. Thanks to the awesome instructions and support here I successfully updated to 144.0.0.0.0.
These were the basic steps for me, following the instructions in @tsialex's first post;
1. Update from MP51.0085.B00 to MP51.0089.B00
2. Install a GPU with Metal support
3. Using the full Mojave installer, update to 140.0.0.0.0
4. Using the full Mojave installer again, update to 144.0.0.0.0
I don't know why, but the first time I updated using the Mojave installer it only updated to 140.0.0.0.0. It didn't go directly to 144.0.0.0.0. Not a big deal, but for me it required a second effort. I also had to download the Mojave installer twice, because after upgrading to 140.0.0.0.0 I tried to run the installer again and got an error saying the installer was 'damaged'. So I deleted it, downloaded again, and it worked.
I'm thrilled everything went smoothly, and I'm now up to 144.0.0.0.0. Thanks again to @tsialex for the awesome instructions and support!!
Verification after step 3;
Verification after step 4;
FYI; I chose the Sapphire Radeon RX 580.
Going to increase the RAM today to 32Gb, hopefully switch permanently to the NVMe as a boot drive, and enjoy a faster cMP!
One other note; I noticed while testing the NVMe SSD in the PCIe slot that the boot time is only marginally faster than the 10k RPM raptor boot drive. I was hoping this would improve significantly. Booting via the Raptor drive takes about 55 seconds from the chime. On the SSD it's still about 40-45 seconds. Speed test says the drive itself has read/write times roughly 12x faster than the Raptor, but the boot time isn't much better...
Anyone have suggestions for improving this?
BMD speed test of the NVMe drive;
You made your own mess, since you used an old Mojave installer, 10.14.1 to 10.14.4, the only way to get to 140.0.0.0.0 nowadays.
Since Apple released 10.14.5 full installer on the Mac App Store, the firmware inside the Mojave installer is 144.0.0.0.0.
Don't know where I went wrong; I downloaded the full Mojave installer only 4 days ago, so I don't know how it's possible I got the old installer.
It's your own error somewhere a long the way, since 10.14.5 was released, MAS installers only have 144.0.0.0.0.
You can check yourself:
Code:
Install\ macOS\ Mojave/Install\ macOS\ Mojave.app/Contents/Resources/Firmware/MP51.fdThe only way to get 140.0.0.0.0 from Apple today is using installinstallmacos.py and downloading the special build 18E2034, still available inside the sucatalog probably for Internet Recovery of iMac19,1 (iMac Retina 5K 27" 2019), you can't get it from the Mac App Store:
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Mac Pro firmware during POST test all the RAM and if you have PCIe drives installed, it will check/map all the PCIe space for other drives. More RAM, more time testing. Install a PCIe drive, firmware will map all PCIe space.
The only way to improve boot time is using only SATA drives connected to the south bridge SATA ports and having as little RAM as possible - so, you have a tradeoff to accept here.
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Just got a 2010 5,1 --- have booted Sierra onto a SADA HHD and am trying to get High Sierra to upgrade the firmware but running into a problem where every time I boot the installer, it brings up the firmware update screen, I click shut down, it asks for a password to install the "helper app" ... I type in my password and then the computer shuts down. When I hold the power button and wait for the flashing light and beep it just ends up booting me back up as normal. The firmware never updates.
I'm running an ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024 MB with DVI to a Benq monitor. Have removed all other drives and all but 1 stick of RAM.
What am I missing here?
I'm running an ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024 MB with DVI to a Benq monitor. Have removed all other drives and all but 1 stick of RAM.
What am I missing here?
You can't upgrade firmware from USB, you have to do from macOS. Install Sierra, then download the High Sierra MAS installer, open it to upgrade the firmware. Use standard SATA disk with HFS+ partition.
Btw, you need a real AppleOEM GPU.
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