MP 1,1-5,1 Manually Configured OpenCore on the Mac Pro

[Ausdauersportler]

Hi all, I have a question that I've searched around but can't find the thread that I'm sure exists somewhere. Hopefully this will help someone else as well.

I have the latest Opencore on my PCIe SSD running Catalina in my 5,1 (disk A). On the second SSD drive of the PCIe card I have Mojave as my fallback drive (disk B).

I installed Big Sur 11.2.3 on a HDD in one of the Sata drives on the cMP to try it out (disk C). Big Sur was running well enough that I started installing apps and things, thinking my old-school OS X mentality that I could simply clone Disk C to Disk A and be done with it. Ah, but can I? The other thing is that where I live my internet is quite slow, so not downloading FCP, Photoshop, etc. again to install to to Disk A would be great (I wanted to make sure everything was working well in BS before committing to it).

Since Big Sur's file system is different than Catalina's, I'm assuming I'd need to wipe Disk A. So my thought was to do this:

1) Format Disk A/OC+Catalina while booted in Disk C/Big Sur
2) While booted in Big Sur/Disk C, can I use CCC 6 to clone itself/Disk C to Disk A? I'd be basically making a bootable backup of itself to the Disk A SSD.
3) Boot into Disk B/Mojave and re-install OC on Disk A and reboot to select Disk A as my startup disk.

I've found quite a few threads doing Big Sur > Big Sur backups but none that quite matched this situation.

Thank you -- any assistance is helpful.

Hi!

reading through some Google hits I found this post about your CCC plans.

Have fun reading. Looks like a bootable copy will be hard to get.

 

[austinhealey175]

Thanks, yeah I’ve realized I need to learn more about Big Sur’s file system which I’ve now done… thankfully Bombich’s documentation is excellent so it gave me an idea of what’s going on.

I’m attempting it via CCC 6 from my Big Sur HDD and will report back on how it goes.

Edit: It worked. And it was easy. The key with CCC 6 is to select "Legacy Bootable Backup Assistant" and it will then clone both the Big Sur drives (OS and user data) to the newly formatted destination drive. It took about 40 minutes to clone. After it was done I checked the EFI on the original, OpenCore destination drive and it still had OC there, so I rebooted, selected drive 1 and here I am -- typing from it now.

Edit 2: Bombich has some useful info at this link regarding the process at the link below. You must format the destination drive and it will be renamed, but you'll be able to rename it yourself after. One note: once you hit "start" CCC starts the command line ASR utility and there's no turning back even though CCC will show you a stop or pause button (don't remember which). Once done and booted into the SSD I then reversed the process (but not using Legacy Bootable Backup Assistant) and had CCC clone only the user side of the Big Sur SSD to the Big Sur HDD -- which I'll use for a bootable backup now. This is my work machine so I'm keen on keeping things redundant.

Creating legacy bootable copies of macOS (Big Sur and later) - Bombich Software

bombich.com

 

[Ausdauersportler]

Thanks, yeah I’ve realized I need to learn more about Big Sur’s file system which I’ve now done… thankfully Bombich’s documentation is excellent so it gave me an idea of what’s going on.

I’m attempting it via CCC 6 from my Big Sur HDD and will report back on how it goes.

Edit: It worked. And it was easy. The key with CCC 6 is to select "Legacy Bootable Backup Assistant" and it will then clone both the Big Sur drives (OS and user data) to the newly formatted destination drive. It took about 40 minutes to clone. After it was done I checked the EFI on the destination drive and it still had OC there, so I rebooted, selected drive 1 and here I am -- typing from it now.

You could achieve your goal using apple replication utility, only. No costs, no dependency on third party products when it comes to data recovery.

 

[juliovg]

Updated: May 3, 2021

OpenCore on Legacy Apple Hardware

This guide explains how to use the excellent OpenCore bootloader on a Mac Pro 5,1 to install, run and update macOS Catalina and macOS Big Sur, resulting in a clean, unpatched operating system no different than on a supported Mac.

🚫 macOS Big Sur 11.3 and higher is currently not viable for the Mac Pro 5,1. See the dedicated thread for updates.​

Why OpenCore?

There are several advantages to using OpenCore on a classic Mac Pro:

Boot picker screen (even with a standard graphics card)
View attachment 1723702
Software Update (just like on a supported Mac)
View attachment 1723703
Hardware acceleration (and DRM for Netflix on Safari)View attachment 1723704
Another approach to installing and running macOS on unsupported Macs consist of applying a series of rigid patches. Although effective, this strategy may be considered undesirable, because it alters system files—a potential problem for updates. With OpenCore, macOS remains entirely untouched. Necessary modifications take place cleanly in memory.

Why this Guide?

The purpose of this guide is to provide step-by-step hands-on instructions to using OpenCore on the Mac Pro 5,1. Included with the instructions is a basic sample configuration to get you started. Guidelines for creating a more advanced configuration customized to your machine are also detailed.

👍 The included sample configuration is about as minimal of a configuration as possible for using OpenCore on a Mac.​

Additional Resources

Since this guide appeared, other solutions to OpenCore on Apple hardware have been proposed. Here on MacRumors, you have a few options:

1. This guide (step-by-step hands-on instructions)
2. Martin's Package (very popular easy-to-install one-package-fits-all solution provided by @h9826790 with emphasis on hardware acceleration)
3. MyBootMgr (great multi-boot solution provided by @Dayo with a rich suite of helper apps for setting up and maintaining RefindPlus and OpenCore)
4. OC Plistlib Generator (diligent programmatic solution provided by @TECK for automating OpenCore updates)

Another great solution is the OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OCLP) provided by the Dortania team. This solution, which applies not only to the Mac Pro 5,1, probes your hardware to dynamically configure OpenCore for your Mac.

Requirements

This guide is aimed at systems with the following specifications:

Mac Pro model	Early 2009 with MacPro5,1 firmware,* Mid 2010 or Mid 2012
Processor architecture	Westmere (E56xx, L56xx, X56xx) / Gulftown (W36xx)
Boot ROM version	144.0.0.0.0
Graphics	EFI (flashed) or a standard UEFI card (PC GPU) supported in Catalina or Big Sur
Wireless	Chipset supported in Catalina or Big Sur (BCM943224, BCM9435x, BCM9436x)

Spoiler: More details

Need to upgrade your boot ROM? See the upgrade instructions.

Regarding Graphics: Several GPUs supported in macOS High Sierra are not supported in macOS Mojave or later. This includes all non-Kepler generation NVIDIA GPUs as well as AMD GPUs earlier than HD 7950. Several HD 78xx GPUs (Pitcairn) were rebadged as R9 2xx and are not supported in macOS Mojave or later. All classic Mac Pro factory GPUs had support removed with Mojave.

Acknowledgements

A big thank you to @vit9696 and the other talented developers of Acidanthera for making all of this possible. Special gratitude goes to @h9826790 for spearheading the hardware acceleration study and @startergo for the relentless testing that led to boot screen support. And thanks to all those that have contributed to this thread!

PART I
Basic Installation



PART II
Advanced Configuration




PART III
Maintenance




PART IV
Installing and Updating macOS




APPENDIX
Installing Windows and Linux​

Is it possible add and explanation of how configure Titan Ridge 2.0 too?

I will appreciate a lot, i was using other option founded using google, and my titan ridge doesn't work, So , please, please add the step on this tutorial how configure Titan Ridge 2.0 card.

Regards

 

[tsialex]

Is it possible add and explanation of how configure Titan Ridge 2.0 too?

I will appreciate a lot, i was using other option founded using google, and my titan ridge doesn't work, So , please, please add the step on this tutorial how configure Titan Ridge 2.0 card.

Regards

There is a thread exclusively for TB and MacPro5,1 configuration and support already, let's not mess with this one.

testing TB3 AIC with MP 5,1

The good folks at egpu.io have had some encouraging results with the latest Gigabyte TB3 add-in card and will be testing in MP 5,1. Will be very interesting to see the results. Hat tip to @itsage. [edit] to correct link

forums.macrumors.com

 

[Oprisk1]

Hi!

reading through some Google hits I found this post about your CCC plans.

Have fun reading. Looks like a bootable copy will be hard to get.

I can confirm that CarbonCopy Cloner will make bootable copy of Catalina (available from bombich.com)
My environment MP-5,1 on OpenCore 0.5.9, running Catalina. I believe BigSur uses same filesystem, and CCC is updated with evolving changes.

Ref: https://bombich.com/blog/2021/05/19...dapting-recovery-strategies-evolving-platform
CCC 5.1.27 and CCC 6 can make bootable backups on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs (11.3+) right now, and we'll continue to support that functionality as long as macOS supports it.

 

[Oprisk1]

I am in the process of establishing a new backup strategy for my Frankentosh (ie, cMP). I have been researching some things and still haven't made any decision for best way to back it all up.. I'm open to hearing how some of you are dealing with backing it up, including. EFI, Windows volumes, etc.. It gets a little tricky for us in my opinion because we are trying to manage different versions of OSX on different volumes, perhaps a Windows Volume, EFI, etc. You can't just backup the whole disk blindly. For example, CCC will not backup the EFI. And windows will need some other treatment also, and that tool MIGHT mess with the EFI.

what I have kind of come to is not to include EFI partition in my nightly backups, I just keep my EFI stuff in a git repository and can easily reinstall the latest version of my OC configuration when I need to.

For Windows10 I'm not at all sure how I should back it up. I've been away from Windows for quite a while, in the old days I just keep a ghost image laying around whenever Windows blew up I'd just restore that image and maybe install a few more things and be happy that I had a fresh clean registry. I'm not at all sure what I would use for backing it up for a daily backup situation.

Then for Catlina full backup I'm a little torn about CCC vs TimeMachine.

TimeMachine has the following advantages:

1. Easy to setup, easy to backup. Brain dead easy. Versioned for getting files from any date back in time. You almost need to have this EVEN IF you are doing CCC also, just to be able to get a file or two from last week, etc.
   
   
2. I personally think its easier to manage the backup media. Plus you can back up both locally and also to a TimeCapsule or a linux that supports TimeMachine backups, which I do already. So I have two complete back ups, in two places in case something happens to one of them.

TimeMachine Disadvantages:

1. Mainly that restoration is a little more involved to do. You have to get Catalina install media, reinstall Catalina and ask to restore from TimeMachine at that time. That will take some hours to do. Also, I'm not 100% this will actually be an exact clone of what was there before, since you're basically reinstalling the OS with whatever is in the current installer you have...and then over-writing that with whatever you had backed up in TimeMachine, which may or may not be completely everything. But I believe this is probably good enough and the most simple thing to do. I also like the comfort in some way of reinstalling OSX before restoring from TimeMachine, so that the system level stuff is completely factory.

CCC Advantages:

1. The backup is a bootable backup. So if you fry your main Catalina, you can actually get booted to the backup within minutes and keep working for the Time being until you can do a proper restore.
   
   
2. Restore is faster and easier then TimeMachine and it will be an EXACT replica of your backup media, including all system files and everything in the Catalina APFS container.
   
   
3. The developer is active and on top of all the latest OSX and APFS technologies, has posted many helpful articles on the internet about it all, which I have high respect for.

CCC Disadvantages:

1. You must be able to boot from the Catalina-clone volume in order to run CCC on it and restore itself back to the new main drive where Catalina should go. You cannot restore from Recovery mode or installmedia booter.
   
   
2. On the cMP this poses one annoyance which is that our USB2 ports are slow, so plugging in an external drive for CCC backup is less then ideal...and if you use an internal drive, then you have the annoyance of managing two volumes with the same content on your system, mounting and unmounting them, etc and other annoyances.
3. CCC cannot backup a clone to a remote system. Catalina has problems with SMB so it can't be done to smart bundles anymore either. You can backup some files to a shared folder over SMB, but may lose many macOS file attributes, etc.. So basically CCC is mainly for doing local back ups to devices connected directly to the cMP itself, it does not currently work well at all for remote backup, especially if you expect to have an actual bootable clone available.
   
   
4. It should be noted that CCC does not quite make an exact image of source Catalina. It does file level copies, more like rsync would do. Its using a lot of smarts to be as smart as it can with latest APFS features, etc, but still at the end of the day, its a file-level copy operation. In some cases Catalina can have so called "cloned" files, which are a feature of Catalina and APFS, and CCC will copy them all as new seperate files, rather then as linked clones. That may or may not matter for many people, not sure, but just pointing it out. Its also not going to copy over snapshots, if you have any. There could be other things that don't get copied to the backup exactly the same as the source because of the inner-working trickery that Apple is doing with Volume Groups and firm links and on and on. CCC took a while to become completely compatible with Catalina..I'm not sure if it even is yet for BigSur, due to stuff like that, but even after all that, CCC is constrained to user level file-level copying....which means it is simply put, NOT an exact clone.. its a bootable system that should be good enough, but might be bigger in size due to losing cloned files, etc.

My current thinking is to stick with TimeMachine, I can backup to two places with complete information to rebuild my Catalina system again, the "Apple way". It will take some hours to do a proper restore though.

But then I am still going to backup with CCC occasionally and especially before doing any kind of big changes like run Apple's security updates, or messing around with stuff that might blow up my partition map. Just because this kind of riskier behavior means I want to be able to restore it quickly if that happens. But more ideally I would not keep that CCC volume in the SATA bays, but as seperate USB drive that I only plug in occasionally to make backups manually at certain times for those kinds of purpose...main disadvantage....USB2 will be slow and I also don't really want that backup media as internal and always in my face with the same content as the source drive.

anyway, I would love to hear what others are doing and especially interested to hearing about anyone using tools like ASR or other things besides the typical answers of "CCC vs TimeMachine".

I believe best to keep the process simple, given the complexity and the many failure points or potential mine fields.
Remove unnecessary drives and keep just two, locally, but once installed propagate the clones.

I prefer CCC given past experience and CCC does make (so far) perfect copies (or selectively copy files).
My approach is to use Apple software when possible, for example Disk Utility to create bootable drive/partitions, that will ensure compliance and consistency with the latest changes made by Apple. The utility will create the EFI and associated partitions formatted with selected file systems. CCC copy (or clone) of a bootable partition to another will also make the clone bootable. The OpenCore boot manager will list a selection of partitions to boot. An alternative is to use Disk Utility restore feature to copy one partition to another, sector by sector. Although I have not tried to copy a windows partition, the sector copy should work.

My system is MacPro 5,1, updated with OpenCore 0.5.9 on which Catalina has been installed. Normally a full bay with 4 drives and M2.SSD card with 2TB. For the planned upgrade to BigSur I made duplicate of the bootable drive, using Disk Utility and CCC to clone drives.
The procedure updating to BigSur with OpenCore 0.6.9 has been unsuccessful, the nvram is not updating. I have tried the many posted suggestions, but none have worked so far.

 

[Dayo]

• SIP bit 0x10 blocks OTA updates.

Does this mean OTA updates are blocked when SIP is enabled given that enabling SIP means setting 0x10?

 

[TECK]

I am in the process of establishing a new backup strategy for my Frankentosh

I think this should have its own thread, nothing to do with OC.

 

[Bmju]

Does this mean OTA updates are blocked when SIP is enabled given that enabling SIP means setting 0x10?

Yes. (Remember that it does not affect Catalina and earlier.)

You need to use csrutil enable --no-internal, not just csrutil enable for OTA updates to work on Big Sur. Or csrutil clear works fine. (Or just clear NVRAM.)

It seems a complete mess to me too - from Apple's end, I mean - as far as I can tell.

But, yes.

 

[Mac Pro Convert]

Hi All

I'm new to opencore, just installed martins config, its working great.
just a few questions:

1) Were do i adjust the OS auto load timeout so its at 0 and will not time out?

2) Can i set a time out for a screen saver as is possible in reFind?
E.G: after 300 seconds(5Mins) it goes into screen saver mode.

3) in the read me it mentioned that if we are using a UEFi windows install,
We should place the BOOT and OC folders on the windows EFi partition,
is this instead of having it on our OSX EFi partition?
will the bless then set the windows EFi as the boot for opencore?

 

[startergo]

Does this mean OTA updates are blocked when SIP is enabled given that enabling SIP means setting 0x10?

I would recommend testing it. For me this bit is not affecting updates. I update with 87F.

 

[Dayo]

I would recommend testing it. For me this bit is not affecting updates. I update with 87F.

Your outcome seems the logical expectation but @Bmju did say he has verified it.
Could be an issue with legacy laptops as I believe he is not on a cMP.

Doesn't make sense in general and something seems off as how then do supported units manage OTA updates?
I will leave ConfigFactory setting 0x87F but changed RefindPlus to recognise this odd setting.

 

[startergo]

Your outcome seems the logical expectation but @Bmju did say he has verified it.
Could be an issue with legacy laptops as I believe he is not on a cMP.

Doesn't make sense in general and something seems off as how then do supported units manage OTA updates?
I will leave ConfigFactory setting 0x87F but changed RefindPlus to recognise this odd setting.

Yes Mike has tested it and some others too have that issue. I am trying to find the pattern. I have no issues on cMP and MBP11.3.

 

[Bmju]

Yes Mike has tested it and some others too have that issue. I am trying to find the pattern. I have no issues on cMP and MBP11.3.

This is where the fact that there are two threads with very overlapping interests can sometimes be difficult, but see: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...unsupported-macs-thread.2242172/post-29961084

I should clarify again, I was going to go with 0x7F (indeed 0x7F and 0x10) but was told that this wouldn't work! By people who _really_ should know - which now includes vit9696, download-fritz/mhaeuser and @dhinakg .

It would help if anyone other than startergo can confirm or disconfirm, ofc! Not doubting the results, just trying to understand them. From my own testing, you can switch between 0x10 set and 0x10 clear - regardless of the other bits in csr-active-config - and it is very simple, in Big Sur, if it is set, you do not get offered updates.

 

[sinn3r1]

Hi all,

Ive been successfully using opencore on my mac pro 5,1 updating to big sur, and incremental updates to 11.2 thanks to this guide

Tonight i decided to update to 11.4 and halfway through the install/loading screen, it got stuck/didnt progress further
I waited a while and decided to restart the machine

Now it wont boot, when I select from bootpicker it gets stuck halfway again

Anyone have any idea? ive tried to rebless the efi using terminal to no avail

Thanks,

Mark

 

[amstel78]

Hi all,

Ive been successfully using opencore on my mac pro 5,1 updating to big sur, and incremental updates to 11.2 thanks to this guide

Tonight i decided to update to 11.4 and halfway through the install/loading screen, it got stuck/didnt progress further
I waited a while and decided to restart the machine

Now it wont boot, when I select from bootpicker it gets stuck halfway again

Anyone have any idea? ive tried to rebless the efi using terminal to no avail

Thanks,

Mark

11.2.3 is the last working version on the cMP 5,1 due to issues with internal bus architecture and current Apple drivers.

Hope you had a backup of 11.2. You may need to restore and rebuild EFI partition. Others more knowledgeable will help, I'm sure.

 

[Dayo]

Tonight i decided to update to 11.4 and halfway through the install/loading screen, it got stuck/didnt progress further

You should always check in with Post 1 before doing anything major such as updating.

There is this notice there:

​

You will have to roll back to 11.2.3 until resolved as advised.

 

[sinn3r1]

yep my fault, i normally do this but wasnt thinking straight this evening
it doesnt look like my timemachine is allowing me to restore from backup

would the best course be to reinstall 11.2, and then use migration assistant?

 

[leandroguerreiro.pt]

Hello there,

I decided to install OpenCore on my 2009 cMP 5.1. I'm running Mojave because I find to be very stable for my work, but don't discard upgrading to Catalina in the near future. I installed the OpenCore 0.6.9 and everything is running smoothly, boot picker, option to upgrade to BigSur, but when I go to VideoProc to see if hardware acceleration is working, the answer is NO. My GPU is an old Nvidia Quadro K5200 8GB and it supports Metal.
Below is my config.
cMP 2009 5,1 (all updates) with 2 x5680, 64GB, nVME boot, 2 HDDs spares, and of course the Quadro K5200.

I'd appreciate if someone can give me some advice in getting the hardware acceleration working with this config.

Cheers,

L

 

[tsialex]

Hello there,

I decided to install OpenCore on my 2009 cMP 5.1. I'm running Mojave because I find to be very stable for my work, but don't discard upgrading to Catalina in the near future. I installed the OpenCore 0.6.9 and everything is running smoothly, boot picker, option to upgrade to BigSur, but when I go to VideoProc to see if hardware acceleration is working, the answer is NO. My GPU is an old Nvidia Quadro K5200 8GB and it supports Metal.
Below is my config.
cMP 2009 5,1 (all updates) with 2 x5680, 64GB, nVME boot, 2 HDDs spares, and of course the Quadro K5200.

I'd appreciate if someone can give me some advice in getting the hardware acceleration working with this config.

Cheers,

L

Hardware assisted compression/decompression/conversion is only for AMD GPUs, starting with RX 460/480.

NVIDIA GPUs are not supported.

 

[leandroguerreiro.pt]

Thanks. I guess the only route is AMD GPUs then.
L

 

[Dayo]

would the best course be to reinstall 11.2, and then use migration assistant?

Sorry, no idea ... You can try a search of the forum/web for tips on how to roll back Big Sur.
I stopped using TimeMachine once I realised CCC does everything it does and more.

 

[leandroguerreiro.pt]

Hardware assisted compression/decompression/conversion is only for AMD GPUs, starting with RX 460/480.

NVIDIA GPUs are not supported.

What if I downgrade to High Sierra? Would I have hardware acceleration? TIA

 

[tsialex]

What if I downgrade to High Sierra? Would I have hardware acceleration? TIA

No.

Like I explained before, only AMD GPUs are supported and you can only enable hardware assisted encoding/decoding/conversion with a MacPro5,1 after 10.14.5.

It's a resource only possible with AMD and Apple own GPUs, NVIDIA GPUs are not supported and don't have the ASICs required using a different type of hardware assistance with Windows/Linux.

If you have any further doubts, please read the first post of the thread below and ask any questions there, not here.

Activate AMD hardware acceleration

[For existing OpenCore users, you can always download my latest OpenCore package at post #1314 for update] Full HWAccel achieved now! Everything is covered in the OpenCore thread. The step by step tutorial to enable AMD hardware acceleration is now at here, but I strongly recommend you go...

forums.macrumors.com