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

[crjackson2134]

@crjackson2134 were you able to boot the installer and proceed with the installation through reboots, though?

So being the stubborn person I am, I kept trying. 4 more tries at installing and it finally worked. The VMM flag not enabled, and my Apple Services are working, so I'll stop for now. I'm concerned that if I change something It'll break again.

Here's what actually worked.
Another clean install of both Mojave, and then OC on a freshly erased drive. Then, once OC was installed and configured, Mojave booting was broken (VMM or not).

So I did a USB stick install of Monterey over the broken Mojave. Then some deep PRAM reboots (6 gongs). Then I tried to boot Monterey and it did.

So far, I'm happy with it, at least it's complete & working. It's a far-cry from what I consider a CLEAN install with the convoluted process it took to get here, but it works, so it stays this time (I think).

 

[cdf]

Here's what actually worked.
Another clean install of both Mojave, and then OC on a freshly erased drive. Then, once OC was installed and confined, Mojave booting was broken (VMM or not).

Congrats on getting it working! Being able to boot Mojave through OC depends on your config. You can either keep -no_compat_check or use the iMac Pro board ID. You can also always just boot Mojave natively; with EnableGop this becomes very easy.

 

[crjackson2134]

Congrats on getting it working! Being able to boot Mojave through OC depends on your config. You can either keep -no_compat_check or use the iMac Pro board ID. You can also always just boot Mojave natively; with EnableGop this becomes very easy.

Wasn't really concerned about Mojave w/OC. I just need a drive I can boot natively when troubleshooting and certain tasks need to be done, that aren't compatible with newer OS version. That's Mojave's only purpose for me. It's a rescue drive. Most of my everyday tasks were being done in DosDude's Catalina. It's been super solid. Now I'll be transitioning everything over to Monterey as a daily-driver.

It was a hella frustrating process to get here, but I'll drink a cold one, and sleep well tonight.

Thanks for all the help.

 

[OldMacPro2]

What make and model is your RX570 ?
Was is it an ex-miner card by any chance ?

EDIT: Set DirectGopRendering = false

This is an older post, but thought I would provide an update.

It's a Sapphire Pulse RX570 8GB card. There was a serial number visible and I was able to verify it on the Sapphire support web site.

Checking further into this card, which I bought (unwisely) used from eBay, it appears to have been an "ex-miner" card.

Using the GPU-Z tool, I was able to figure out that it had been flashed with mining firmware.

Fortunately, the Techpowerup website had a link to the correct VBIOS for this card. After doing some more Web searches and reading up a bit, I was able to use the amdvbflash tool and got it flashed back to the factory default "gaming" firmware.

So it's working for me, I can see the OC boot screen just fine.

 

[crjackson2134]

Is it possible to rename my efi partition to something other than just “efi”, or would that cause boot problems?

If renaming it is okay, how should one go about doing this?

 

[Macschrauber]

Is it possible to rename my efi partition to something other than just “elf”, or would that cause boot problems?

If renaming it is okay, how should one go about doing this?

My dumper package has scripts for renaming the ESP manually or by found bootloader flavor.

Healthy NVRAM normal behaviour on 4,1->5,1 machines

Macschrauber's Rom Dump I needed to encrypt the disk image as DropBox has flagged it for containing Flashrom. The password is rom. What's new in the latest versions: Update from 20-2-2024 -> checking Fsys for missing items or wrong order sometimes they get into the wrong order or items...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[joevt]

Is it possible to rename my efi partition to something other than just “elf”, or would that cause boot problems?

If renaming it is okay, how should one go about doing this?

Just mount the volume and rename it in the Finder.
diskutil mount disk0s1

I renamed all my EFI partitions and added an empty folder to each EFI partition that describes the location of the disk and what EFI boot items exist in the EFI partition.

ls -d /Volumes/EFI*/*EFI_*
/Volumes/EFI850/EFI_Windows_Samsung850Pro
/Volumes/EFI960/EFI_Clover_Samsung960Pro
/Volumes/EFIB1/EFI_Multimedia_TOSHIBA5TB_Bay1
/Volumes/EFIB2/EFI_Windows8and10_MercuryElectra3G_Bay2
/Volumes/EFIB3/EFI_Catalina_MercuryEXTREMEPro6G_Bay3
/Volumes/EFIB4/EFI_Ubuntu_MercuryEXTREMEPro6G_Bay4
/Volumes/EFIMUSHKIN/EFI_mushkin
/Volumes/EFIO1/EFI_MercuryExtremePro6G_ODD1
/Volumes/EFIO2/EFI_MercuryExtremePro6G_ODD2
/Volumes/EFIWD/EFI_Clover_WD

 

[crjackson2134]

Thanks guys, I’m still out of town, but I’ll be doing some name cleanup when I get back later in the week. I appreciate the help.

 

[Macschrauber]

As we found earlier that booting High Sierra (when system integrity protection is off) possibly corrupts other OS' Preboot volumes I made a tool to check and repair it.

The High Sierra glitch can set you in a situation where you can not boot anymore, if
-no_compat_check is not in the boot-args, giving you:

- a prohibited sign in GUI,
- invalid board ID in verbose mode,
- a hard shutdown after 30 seconds with no visible preboot display

Maybe other OS' than High Sierra are affected, too. At least I have seen one report of a guy attaching another OS in TDM.

the link:

High Sierra booting possibly corrupts newer Systems. Fix, description and a boot picker renamer

Summary: We discovered a serious bug: booting High Sierra without System Integrity Protection (csrutil disable) possibly corrupts another mounted (unsupported) APFS2* OS Preboot volume, even when on another drive. Consequently, the corrupted OS may appear as High Sierra and check for...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[PeterHolbrook]

Using OCLP, yesterday I installed Sonoma 14.2.1 on a separate hard drive on my Mac Pro 5,1. Much to my surprise, everything seems to work, including graphic acceleration on my rudimentary AMD Radeon HD 7970 3 GB. However, I didn't see an automatic OCLP-way of fine-tuning some aspects of the setup, like, for instance, including an ACPI definition for my Titan-Ridge Thunderbolt card. Eventually, I manually edited the OCLP-generated config.plist in order to add the relevant ACPI aml file, which worked fine. I'm assuming that such manual fine-tuning won't survive the arrival of a newer version of OCLP, so some kind of manual maintenance would be required.

I was wondering if it would be possible or advisable, once Sonoma has been installed on a Mac Pro 5,1, to revert to "vanilla" OpenCore and proceed as we have been doing when maintaining OSes earlier than Ventura. For instance, would new releases of Sonoma be safe and updatable as we've been doing with Monterey?

 

[cdf]

I was wondering if it would be possible or advisable, once Sonoma has been installed on a Mac Pro 5,1, to revert to "vanilla" OpenCore and proceed as we have been doing when maintaining OSes earlier than Ventura. For instance, would new releases of Sonoma be safe and updatable as we've been doing with Monterey?

On the OC side of things it's certainly possible, but that's only half the story. Your Sonoma installation isn't vanilla. It requires heavy modifications (shoehorned cryptex and altered kexts) to run on your Mac, so you also need to make sure those modifications get applied. It's possible to do this manually (albeit with the kexts that come with OCLP), but it's certainly not advisable!

 

[flaubert]

Curious if anyone has advice for me... I'm running OpenCore 0.9.7 (updated from original 0.9.5 prepared as per post #1). The computer is at Monterey 12.7.1; the recent Safari update appeared in Software Update, and I did that successfully. However, I'm not being offered 12.7.2, which came out mid-December. Any ideas on what to check? The only non-standard thing in my OpenCore is I don't load the FeatureUnlock kext, since I formerly had random but seemingly harmless errors from the OS telling me that my disk was corrupted.

 

[joevt]

Curious if anyone has advice for me... I'm running OpenCore 0.9.7 (updated from original 0.9.5 prepared as per post #1). The computer is at Monterey 12.7.1; the recent Safari update appeared in Software Update, and I did that successfully. However, I'm not being offered 12.7.2, which came out mid-December. Any ideas on what to check? The only non-standard thing in my OpenCore is I don't load the FeatureUnlock kext, since I formerly had random but seemingly harmless errors from the OS telling me that my disk was corrupted.

You could download the 12.7.2 installer, use createinstallmedia to make a bootable installer, then install it over 12.7.1. It will update that to 12.7.2 without erasing anything.

 

[basslik]

You could download the 12.7.2 installer, use createinstallmedia to make a bootable installer, then install it over 12.7.1. It will update that to 12.7.2 without erasing anything.

I just updated, did not do nothing to my setup.

 

[robinsonsampa]

Hi guys, I need some help, in BootPicker I accidentally selected BootKicker as default (by holding down the Ctrl key) and now I can't get back into the system. Because it no longer shows the system volume of the container, only the data volume. How do I return to default startup?

What I've already tried:

• reinstall Open Core completely
• I booted from the Big Sur installer and checked the volumes with first aid, they are all ok
• using the installation drive I tried to select the correct volume on the boot disk
• I disabled BootKicker in config.plist
• reset nvram
• reset smc

Nothing worked, in my Boot Picker only the macOS-Data volume remains (which does not boot the system)

Any suggestions?

If BootPicker is in BootKicker mode by default, how do I revert back to the previous volume if it doesn't show up?

Where is the preference file that records the last default volume chosen for boot?

I'm on a MacPro5,1

Thank you so much!

EDIT: Another guy in discord said this is because I booted High Sierra which corrupted the preboot volume of the macOS Big Sur, so I will have to fix it now. Any way to do it via terminal, or I will need to reinstall Big Sur over?

 

[Macschrauber]

Hi guys, I need some help, in BootPicker I accidentally selected BootKicker as default (by holding down the Ctrl key) and now I can't get back into the system. Because it no longer shows the system volume of the container, only the data volume. How do I return to default startup?

What I've already tried:

• reinstall Open Core completely
• I booted from the Big Sur installer and checked the volumes with first aid, they are all ok
• using the installation drive I tried to select the correct volume on the boot disk
• I disabled BootKicker in config.plist
• reset nvram
• reset smc

Nothing worked, in my Boot Picker only the macOS-Data volume remains (which does not boot the system)

Any suggestions?

If BootPicker is in BootKicker mode by default, how do I revert back to the previous volume if it doesn't show up?

Where is the preference file that records the last default volume chosen for boot?

I'm on a MacPro5,1

Thank you so much!

EDIT: Another guy in discord said this is because I booted High Sierra which corrupted the preboot volume of the macOS Big Sur, so I will have to fix it now. Any way to do it via terminal, or I will need to reinstall Big Sur over?

I made a tool for repairing the High Sierra mess:

High Sierra booting possibly corrupts newer Systems. Fix, description and a boot picker renamer

Summary: We discovered a serious bug: booting High Sierra without System Integrity Protection (csrutil disable) possibly corrupts another mounted (unsupported) APFS2* OS Preboot volume, even when on another drive. Consequently, the corrupted OS may appear as High Sierra and check for...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[robinsonsampa]

I made a tool for repairing the High Sierra mess:

High Sierra booting possibly corrupts newer Systems. Fix, description and a boot picker renamer

Summary: We discovered a serious bug: booting High Sierra without System Integrity Protection (csrutil disable) possibly corrupts another mounted (unsupported) APFS2* OS Preboot volume, even when on another drive. Consequently, the corrupted OS may appear as High Sierra and check for...

forums.macrumors.com

You can use the latest bleeding edge version posted in this thread.

Hi Macschrauber! After knowing the problem I managed to find your post about this issue.

Thank you very much for your tool and scripts, I'll try it right now.

As I had a backup of the time machine, I was able to restore the snapshot of the system volume, and at least I was able to boot into Big Sur, but only macOS1-Data continues to appear in Boot Pick. As I'm back in the system I'm going to test your tool to try to resolve the rest of the mess.

I really appreciate your help, tks.

 

[N008]

Hi Everyone,

I am just about to install Open Core and I wished to discuss about the drives and partitions set up.
My current set up looks like that:
Bay 1 - 256 GB for Mojave
Bay 2 - 500 GB
Bay 3 - empty
Bay 4 - empty

For First set up I plan:
Bay 1 - 256 GB for OC and Mojave
Bay 2 - 500 GB for Win 11(for gaming and screen recording)
Bay 3 - 500 GB for Monterey(for video editing)
Bay 4 - empty

Bay 1
1. Would it be wise to install OC and Mojave on Bay 1?(and should I make different partitions on it)?
(I recall that Lance mentioned in his 2024? vid that its not good to put OC on same disk, but I don't know why?)

Bay 2 & 3
2. Should I make partitions to Bay 2 to copy video files easily to Bay 3 for video editing?


////
And for final set up in the future:
Bay 1 - 256 GB for OC and Mojave
Bay 2 - 500 GB / 2TB for Win 11(for gaming and screen recording)
Bay 3 - empty
Bay 4 - empty
PCIe - Sonnet McFiver 2 TB / 4 TB for Monterey(for video editing)

Any ideas are welcome.

 

[sfalatko]

Upgrade to 12.7.3 worked fine.

 

[basslik]

Upgrade to 12.7.3 worked fine.

How do you get .3 I try updating and only option is Sonoma. I'm on 12.7.2

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

How do you get .3 I try updating and only option is Sonoma. I'm on 12.7.2

M.b. Terminal - softwareupdate -l ?

 

[crjackson2134]

Mine updated perfectly from the software update app. in system preferences. It shows Sonoma of course, but under that, there is an option/link showing "more info" that shows other updates. From there you can select 12.7.3 and Safari (17.3 I think).

All was smooth and efficient. Everything working normal.

 

[sfalatko]

M.b. Terminal - softwareupdate -l ?

In System Preferences > Software Update look below where it offers Sonoma and there will be a item you can select - something like "More info" (not the one immediately next to the Sonoma logo). Once you select that you will get another dialog that offers 12.7.3 and Safari 17.3. you can check either or both and then "Install" in the lower right.

 

[N008]

As we found earlier that booting High Sierra (when system integrity protection is off) possibly corrupts other OS' Preboot volumes I made a tool to check and repair it.

The High Sierra glitch can set you in a situation where you can not boot anymore, if
-no_compat_check is not in the boot-args, giving you:

- a prohibited sign in GUI,
- invalid board ID in verbose mode,
- a hard shutdown after 30 seconds with no visible preboot display

Maybe other OS' than High Sierra are affected, too. At least I have seen one report of a guy attaching another OS in TDM.

the link:

High Sierra booting possibly corrupts newer Systems. Fix, description and a boot picker renamer

Summary: We discovered a serious bug: booting High Sierra without System Integrity Protection (csrutil disable) possibly corrupts another mounted (unsupported) APFS2* OS Preboot volume, even when on another drive. Consequently, the corrupted OS may appear as High Sierra and check for...

forums.macrumors.com

Mac Pro 5,1 2010
- Mojave 10.14.6
- 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5690 @ 3.47GHz (Westmere)
- 64Gb DDR3 EEC 1333MHz (8 x 8 Gb)
- 256Gb SSD
- Radeon PULSE RX 580 4Gb

- Apple Magic keyboard
- Logitech MX620 Laser Cordless Mouse


I just made EnableGOP few days ago(and I am not sure did I left SIP off) and today tried to start with Martin Lo's Open Core install(first install ever). and after this step:
"please perform a 3xNVRAM reset,"

I got this situation:
after 3rd chime it showed (EnableGOP) boot selection for a 1-2 sec and then showed "stop sign"/"prohibited sign in GUI"/(ghostbuster sign) for few sec’s and then turned MP off.

What should I do?

 

[Macschrauber]

Mac Pro 5,1 2010
- Mojave 10.14.6
- 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5690 @ 3.47GHz (Westmere)
- 64Gb DDR3 EEC 1333MHz (8 x 8 Gb)
- 256Gb SSD
- Radeon PULSE RX 580 4Gb

- Apple Magic keyboard
- Logitech MX620 Laser Cordless Mouse


I just made EnableGOP few days ago(and I am not sure did I left SIP off) and today tried to start with Martin Lo's Open Core install(first install ever). and after this step:
"please perform a 3xNVRAM reset,"

I got this situation:
after 3rd chime it showed (EnableGOP) boot selection for a 1-2 sec and then showed "stop sign"/"prohibited sign in GUI"/(ghostbuster sign) for few sec’s and then turned MP off.

What should I do?

boot verbose (hold cmd-v) and take a photo of the error message.

Maybe you got something totally wrong and boot Mojave with a board ID of a Mac Pro 7,1

btw: this thread is not the correct thread, this is for the manual approach.

this is the Martin Lo flavor thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/32880950/