Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Mountain Lion on a Mac Pro 2,1 2007!!!

B

Baytriple

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Apr 3, 2012
274
0
After about 7 hours and various message from http://www.jabbawok.net (thank you if you are on here) It would only really take 1 tops if you knew what you were doing.

I have finally got Mountain Lion on my 2,1 2007 Mac Pro. I am so happy. :)

I begrudgingly ordered a Retina MBP as I thought it was the end for my Quad-Core Intel Xeon 2.99 GHz (it used to be 3 GHz). I cancelled it as I couldn't bring myself to spend all that money when all I really wanted was an updated MP.

Anyway. If I can do it then Im sure you can have a crack at it too.

The proof.
http://s427.photobucket.com/albums/...view&current=ScreenShot2012-06-26at190914.png
 
Last edited:
I'm curious what is it in Mountain Lion that's so important that you'd spend thousands of dollars and go from a desktop to a laptop just to get it?

I'm still using Snow Leopard, mostly because I don't like many of the small, subtle changes in Lion. Support for more video cards is probably the one reason I'm considering ML.
 
ActionableMango said:
I'm curious what is it in Mountain Lion that's so important that you'd spend thousands of dollars and go from a desktop to a laptop just to get it?

I'm still using Snow Leopard, mostly because I don't like many of the small, subtle changes in Lion. Support for more video cards is probably the one reason I'm considering ML.
Click to expand...

I was just looking to modernise my kit. Get some thunderbolt action and a 27 inch thunderbolt screen. Although I didn't realise how expensive thunderbolt storage drives were.

I have a 2011 17 mac book pro and a 2007 Mac Pro. Which I'm very happy with for home/work use.

My motivation was to keep my phone, laptop and desktop in sync. I spend a lot of time on my comp being a graphic designer and do enjoy having a little play if possible.
 
I am still hopeful that the fact that DP1 COULD EASILY run on a 1,1 will lead to a better hack once the GM hits.

They went to the bother of writing a 32 bit kernel and even released it out into the wild, let's hope some clever folks figure out how to adapt it into the GM.
 
MacVidCards said:
I am still hopeful that the fact that DP1 COULD EASILY run on a 1,1 will lead to a better hack once the GM hits.

They went to the bother of writing a 32 bit kernel and even released it out into the wild, let's hope some clever folks figure out how to adapt it into the GM.
Click to expand...

I have been using ML all evening and it is running everything just fine on the Developer 4 version.
 
the problem is not getting ML running.

the problem is it's not supported by Apple.

you could basically accidently update to 10.8.1 and have your work machine bricked by missing drivers.

that's why most people SHOULD stay on Lion.
 
ActionableMango said:
Support for more video cards is probably the one reason I'm considering ML.
Click to expand...
IIRC when Snow Leopard was about to come out, drivers from some beta had been used in Leopard for using newer graphic cards. Maybe something like this is possible again: Sticking to Snow Leopard while using ML drivers for newer graphic cards.

Perhaps a Dev can tell whether there have been API changes in that area from 10.6 to 10.8...
 
Baytriple said:
After about 7 hours and various message from http://www.jabbawok.net (thank you if you are on here) It would only really take 1 tops if you knew what you were doing.

I have finally got Mountain Lion on my 2,1 2007 Mac Pro. I am so happy.[/url]
Click to expand...

Sweet :) I'm also trying to install DP4 on my Mac Pro 2,1 however I can't seem to boot into Mountain Lion hard drive without kernel panic or 'no entry' symbol. I've followed everything in Jabbawok's instruction but I feel like I'm missing something.

Did you do anything differently from Jabbawok's instruction to get your Mac Pro 2,1 to work such as editing the smbios.plist? I'd like to know if anything else you did differently.

[edit] I've found the problem, it was the 7200 card that crashed or prevented ML from booting up. After removing the card, ML worked beautifully.
 
Last edited:
Baytriple said:
I was just looking to modernise my kit. Get some thunderbolt action and a 27 inch thunderbolt screen. Although I didn't realise how expensive thunderbolt storage drives were.

I have a 2011 17 mac book pro and a 2007 Mac Pro. Which I'm very happy with for home/work use.

My motivation was to keep my phone, laptop and desktop in sync. I spend a lot of time on my comp being a graphic designer and do enjoy having a little play if possible.
Click to expand...


Thunderbolt is only available on the logic board. And that doesn't seem to be changing for the foreseeable future.

If you want to freshen up your box - add SSDs and up your ram.

A 2007 can take up to 6 hard drives internally with no aftermarket parts. I have 2 SSDs (OWC 240 Electras - Boot Drive) in a Raid 0, 2 2TB hard drives in another Raid 0 (Data Drive), and the other 2 2TB in another Raid 0 (iTunes Library) - with an external 6TB Raid 5 as a backup.


You can add 4 more (2.5") hard drives with a DX4 from TransIntl.
 
Baytriple said:
I begrudgingly ordered a Retina MBP as I thought it was the end for my Quad-Core Intel Xeon 2.99 GHz (it used to be 3 GHz). I cancelled it as I couldn't bring myself to spend all that money when all I really wanted was an updated MP.
Click to expand...

For a Retina MBP with 16GB of memory ( minimally $2,300 ) there are currently 1 (almost two if go up the $2,500 ) refurb Mac Pro's that would be an upgrade (not update) to the 2007 Mac Pro sitting on.

Requires 0 hours of tweaking to run Mountain Lion. Extremely likely will require 0 hours of tweaking to run 10.9 when it arrives.

It is rather curious when folks yell "old tech" at the current models from 4-5 year even older models.
 
How?

Baytriple said:
After about 7 hours and various message from http://www.jabbawok.net (thank you if you are on here) It would only really take 1 tops if you knew what you were doing.

I have finally got Mountain Lion on my 2,1 2007 Mac Pro. I am so happy. :)

I begrudgingly ordered a Retina MBP as I thought it was the end for my Quad-Core Intel Xeon 2.99 GHz (it used to be 3 GHz). I cancelled it as I couldn't bring myself to spend all that money when all I really wanted was an updated MP.

Anyway. If I can do it then Im sure you can have a crack at it too.

The proof.
http://s427.photobucket.com/albums/...view&current=ScreenShot2012-06-26at190914.png
Click to expand...

How did you do it? I want to install mountain lion onto a 2007 Mac Pro, how do I do this?
 
vinny. said:
How did you do it? I want to install mountain lion onto a 2007 Mac Pro, how do I do this?
Click to expand...

Ummm, he posted a link to the website. jabbawok.net.... look for "how I installed Mt Lion on my Mac Pro 1,1" (even further to spoon feed you, look at the links on the right hand size of the main page). A 1,1 and 2,1 are the same machine.

I did this although to be honest, I ended up reverting back to Lion. My whole reasoning for upgrading to Mt Lion was for Messages really and for some reason my UUID got all scrambled using the hack above and so I couldn't use Messages anyway. There were also lots of other issues I ran into and the boot time was practically double. I have resigned myself to wait until 2013 when the next "mac pro" (or whatever they call it) is released.

Edit: I realize that paragraph two may have been due to something I did, but frankly it just wasn't worth my time to redo the entire install again.
 
Failure

I tried this and I followed the instructions to the letter, was quite involved. Now my computer won't even let me boot off a disk, won't let me reset pram setting, won't let me start up in recovery mode, won't let me boot off another drive. Nothing, just says boot boot boot boot boot boot error boot boot boot error
 
vinny. said:
I tried this and I followed the instructions to the letter, was quite involved. Now my computer won't even let me boot off a disk, won't let me reset pram setting, won't let me start up in recovery mode, won't let me boot off another drive. Nothing, just says boot boot boot boot boot boot error boot boot boot error
Click to expand...

I made sure before attempting to do the above, was to have a perfectly cloned copy of my 10.7.5 install. When I was unhappy with my 10.8.2 install, I just ripped out the PATA drive, reset the pram (cmd + option + P + R), and told my Mac Pro to boot from the external cloned drive of 10.7.5.
 
I successfully did this with my 2007 Mac Pro 2,1 as well. My only issue is that it doesn't always come back from sleep, so I don't put it to sleep at all, but I rarely did that anyway so not a big loss and not a deal breaker for me. I haven't really investigated that, there might be a fix that I'm not aware of. Aside from the sleep issue, it's been rock solid.

I followed Jabbawok's instructions but I used a newer version of Chameleon (2.1 r2069) than what he said to use. Not sure there was any value in using the newer version, though.

Mountain Lion is much better than Lion (in regards to bug fixes, stability, and features), so I think this is worth doing if you are on Lion, though maybe Lion has received the bug fixes that were previously Mountain Lion-only. However, if you are on Snow Leopard, can run all the software you want to, and you are happy with it, I'm not sure it's worth upgrading, though.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back