Thanks for confirming! Only reason I went with USB drive was because I wanted my SATA port back.... my previous OC installation was on an old SSD that didn't have anything else installed on it. Now I just keep it as a backup OC.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
MP 1,1-5,1 Manually Configured OpenCore on the Mac Pro
- Thread starter cdf
- WikiPost WikiPost
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
- Status
You shouldn't install anything to the EFI of a Mojave drive you're going to flash from. Keep it native and macOS will boot up if its the only drive in. I too recently flashed and admit I got stressed out by the process and made it more complex than it was.
I haven't had a boot screen for a good few months now and used to use a flashed GPU to switch between a lot of different installs and legacy Windows 10. Since swapping to an AMD I haven't needed it and don't value it as much as I previously did. I already had an old ATI in my 3,1 and thinking some day that would fail and I would be in trouble, I got an MVC NVIDIA for my 4,1 and I really regret it now looking back!
If you are using OpenCore and set up a clean Mojave recovery drive and keep it totally separate from other drives and partitions you can even disable SIP via rEFIndPlus and then take out everything else and in firmware mode flash from it without needing to bless or boot from anything manually.
I used a little 60GB SSD in a SATA bay as a boot manager blessed with MyBootManager and a separate internal 250GB SSD Mojave emergency vanilla CCC clone of Mojave on NVMe (and many other clones and installs I now realise I didn't really need internal). Despite so many installs and wondering what would happen if I removed the blessed EFI rEFIndPlus drive with a corrupt rom on the verge of bricking, all it took was to just leave the one drive untouched by OC or rEFInd with Mojave in with the unflashed GPU and everything booted automatically.
Last edited:
No I ran into problems where native Mojave was stuck at black screen with my rx580 and unable to get to recovery mode either In order to disable sip or to bless an efi where rEFInd plus might be available etc.
ultimaely I had to get another computer and create a usb bootable installer, had to put my old non metal gpu card in order to option boot to it and then specify it as startup so that I could power off and put rx580 back in so I could reinstall Mojave but when the installer automatically reboots itself I am stuck at black screen again. I’m still stuck now actuallly.
being able to have rx580 flashed would make this entire fiasco easier to see wtf is going on at the black screen of course but if flashed rx580 will break OC or RefindPlus in any way then I won’t do it. However what you are suggesting above is not possible to do for me in this scenario since I get stuck in a mode where it won’t go to recovery mode because if some kind of corruption, and won’t get past black screen on the boot then how am I supposed to bless it to get to some other volume where an efi with rEFInd plus is located?
ultimaely I had to get another computer and create a usb bootable installer, had to put my old non metal gpu card in order to option boot to it and then specify it as startup so that I could power off and put rx580 back in so I could reinstall Mojave but when the installer automatically reboots itself I am stuck at black screen again. I’m still stuck now actuallly.
being able to have rx580 flashed would make this entire fiasco easier to see wtf is going on at the black screen of course but if flashed rx580 will break OC or RefindPlus in any way then I won’t do it. However what you are suggesting above is not possible to do for me in this scenario since I get stuck in a mode where it won’t go to recovery mode because if some kind of corruption, and won’t get past black screen on the boot then how am I supposed to bless it to get to some other volume where an efi with rEFInd plus is located?
Last edited:
That's what I was trying to say and also why a boot screen isn't needed or why not to put anything on the EFI. Maybe I confused things with describing how I had my drives setup before I flashed in a bit of an emergency way (not ideal) but to avoid bricking from more writes and it sounded similar to your setup (or maybe just how you wanted to have it?) with rEFIndPlus blessed which I had toggled SIP with already to dump the rom which was what showed the corruption. This was just an emergency flash as clean installing would be dangerous so to avoid any more NVRAM writes I just had to remove that drive along with every OS that OpenCore booted to leaving a non OC touched Mojave. Did you ever log in to that Mojave with OpenCore at all?
If there's nothing else in the Mac you don't need to option select anything. Hence no boot screen needed.
Last edited:
I'm still stuck though, on the black screen and now the instructions from Alex are to go get and install High Sierra so I can diagnose the problem. This will involve making a new USB bootable media and swapping video cards, etc. :-(
Anyway, let me solve my broken mac with Alex and I'll come back to this question in a few days. Alex suggests I get flashed GPU, I will try to find out whether that will work fine with RefindPlus and OC. I don't want to flash it unless unless I know it will not break anything. If not, then I can look at scenarios for how to use RefindPlus for disabling SIP and when I need to reflash the bootrom every few months or whatever using RefindPlus in some way. I like the sound of that, but right now I need to get my mac working again, so I'll come back to this question in a few days. Thanks.
Anyway, let me solve my broken mac with Alex and I'll come back to this question in a few days. Alex suggests I get flashed GPU, I will try to find out whether that will work fine with RefindPlus and OC. I don't want to flash it unless unless I know it will not break anything. If not, then I can look at scenarios for how to use RefindPlus for disabling SIP and when I need to reflash the bootrom every few months or whatever using RefindPlus in some way. I like the sound of that, but right now I need to get my mac working again, so I'll come back to this question in a few days. Thanks.
Does it work with the original Mac Pro 5.1 wifi card? Which Kext should I download? How should I configure the OpenCore config.plist?
I thought you were stuck now sorry. I was getting hung up on what was blessed and if I had to bless the Mojave drive after removal of all OC/rEFInd drives but it wasn't required as long as the drive boots natively which I guess is the problem more than anything else here. Yeh as long as you are reinstalling that's best I thought you may be like me and unable to risk another install
My suggestion is not to flash your RX 580, but to use an Apple OEM GPU to identify the real problem lurking somewhere. This is will take some doing, like running AHT/ASD (needs an AppleOEM GPU) and checking everything.
It's a lot easier to get a Mac Pro working again with High Sierra and a HD 5770, that you already have.
Hello, I recently installed the Quadro K6000 in my mac 4.1-> 5.1 (4k Display DP 1,2 or 1080p dispaly via dvi) and don't get the boot screen even using opencore. The choice of the operating system is very important to me, since it is necessary to work in Snowleopard (I worked on old scanner software oXygen and ColorGenius), but mainly High Seirra and Mojave. Maybe someone can help me?
K6000 is not supported before 10.8.2, it's a second semester of 2013 GPU and it's probably not a GOP firmware yet.
OC is not optimized for NVIDIA boot screen. Use @Dayo MyBootmgr to chainload OC you might have a boot screen, but is not guaranteed.
I'm completely satisfied with Martins Pakage, this is what I need, I also count on legacy boot the Snow Leopard
Not for a NVIDIA GPU, no hardware acceleration for NVIDIA GPUs, that don’t even works with 10.6.
How? Snow Leopard don't have NVIDIA Kepler drivers, just Fermi and earlier.
You had a flashed K5000 and got the display unaccelerated via Mac EFI drivers/framebuffer?
I believe @Macschrauber has already confirmed that RefindPlus shows a boot screen with a K6000 and that this propagates to OpenCore when chain-loaded from RefindPlus.
Yes, it was a flashed K5000. I have a question, if I already have martins package, can I painlessly test the MyBootmgr?
K6000 un-flashed will not work before 10.8.2, unless you get an OC compatible GOP firmware flashed.
@Dayo can answer about MyBootMgr/RefindPlus.
Hi guys - Here's the update.
I was able to safely remove my original SSD drive, remove OC, and boot it as an external (Big Sur 11.2.1) boot drive to my 2015 MacBook. So thankfully, my data is safe and appears correctly upgraded.
I've also largely cleaned up most of the other messy Big Sur installs/reinstalls that failed on other drives in the cMP. I also now have a clean "rescue" Mojave installation on one of the internal hard drive partitions if needed.
So I don't make a big mess of everything again, am I correct that the next steps are to:
(1) Using the MacBook and the SSD as an external drive, boot from the external drive's 11.2.1 recovery partition and disable SIP on that SSD
(2) Re-install MLo's OC 0.6.6 onto the SSD's EFI partition (using the MacBook)
(3) I'm assuming that the config.plist should remain untouched (MLo already added the firmware spoofing to the config.plist, and no more having to mess with the VMM flag)?
(4) Close Clover Configurator and run the Blesser
(5) Reinstall the SSD back into the cMP
(6) Reset cMP's NVRAM 3x (zapping PRAM 3x)
(7) The OC's boot picker should show up and it should correctly boot into Big Sur 11.2.1?
****Again, keep in mind that the updated 11.2.1 recovery partition worked just fine under OC, but the main Big Sur partition would NOT boot.****
Just hoping to check here so I don't spend another day making a mess of things. Thanks, everyone!
I was able to safely remove my original SSD drive, remove OC, and boot it as an external (Big Sur 11.2.1) boot drive to my 2015 MacBook. So thankfully, my data is safe and appears correctly upgraded.
I've also largely cleaned up most of the other messy Big Sur installs/reinstalls that failed on other drives in the cMP. I also now have a clean "rescue" Mojave installation on one of the internal hard drive partitions if needed.
So I don't make a big mess of everything again, am I correct that the next steps are to:
(1) Using the MacBook and the SSD as an external drive, boot from the external drive's 11.2.1 recovery partition and disable SIP on that SSD
(2) Re-install MLo's OC 0.6.6 onto the SSD's EFI partition (using the MacBook)
(3) I'm assuming that the config.plist should remain untouched (MLo already added the firmware spoofing to the config.plist, and no more having to mess with the VMM flag)?
(4) Close Clover Configurator and run the Blesser
(5) Reinstall the SSD back into the cMP
(6) Reset cMP's NVRAM 3x (zapping PRAM 3x)
(7) The OC's boot picker should show up and it should correctly boot into Big Sur 11.2.1?
****Again, keep in mind that the updated 11.2.1 recovery partition worked just fine under OC, but the main Big Sur partition would NOT boot.****
Just hoping to check here so I don't spend another day making a mess of things. Thanks, everyone!
Last edited:
There is also a question regarding the choice of OS from the OS itself in the (System Preferences->Startup Disk settings). Does the opencore setting get confused or does it not affect its work?
The blessing must be done on the Mac Pro. Also, if you reset the NVRAM on the Mac Pro after installing OC, then perhaps OC will still start up, but it will not be blessed. This is problematic for routing the boot selection.