MP 1,1-5,1 MP 5,1 -Won't boot up with black screen and continuous chime

[tsialex]

Ok, you've got a point...I'm sorry but I've been at this for so long that I'm getting confused, which isn't hard to do since I'm no expert at this! And I truly appreciate all the help that you've given me, I'm really sorry to keep bothering you like this :/
Any idea how I can get my SSD erased so I can start over again?

You don't have another drive that is non-bootable/don't have a macOS install, that you can install it on SATA1 and install to it via the createinstallmedia USB? Once you have a bootable HighSierra install you can erase your SSD while installed in another SATA port.

You can even buy a sub $35 256GB SATA SSD and do this.

 

[greg97]

Ok, another good news bad news situation! lol I was able to find an old 2TB drive and erased it and put the High Sierra bootable installer on it. I left this HDD in SATA slot 1, then I then attached my SSD to the SATA port inside the empty CD/DVD drive bay (since you specifically mentioned another 'SATA' port). Once I rebooted, my computer booted back into the SSD! (I could see this on the screen! yay!). I thought everything was back to normal at this point, so I reattached my SSD via the PCIe card where it usually sits in my MP, then rebooted, but it came back up booted into the installer HDD?? (but using Disk Utility I could see the SSD as an 'external drive'). At this point I changed my Start Up Disk to my SSD and told it to reboot again. This time all I got was a white screen.
When I went to the AMD site to look up drivers for the RX 580, all it had were Windows drivers but none for Mac.
So I'm not sure why my SSD works when hooked up with the SATA, but won't with the PCIe card?

 

[MIKX]

greg97

You DON'T NEED to download drivers for the Mac but you should be in High Sierra or Mojave, that's where the drivers are. No need to install anything but you cannot get a bootscreen with these newer GPUs like the RX 580 etc .. . yet . . .

 

[greg97]

Thanks for the reply @MIKX, and it’s good to know I don’t need any additional drivers. So the problem still remains, why my SSD boots fine when attached via internal SATA cables, but not when the SSD is attached to an internal PCIe card. I was reading in another thread how another person was able to use the same Apricorn Velocity Solo X2 PCIe card with their SSD along with the Sapphire Radeon Pulse RX 580 with no problems, so I’m not sure what the issue is here?

 

[crjackson2134]

Thanks for the reply @MIKX, and it’s good to know I don’t need any additional drivers. So the problem still remains, why my SSD boots fine when attached via internal SATA cables, but not when the SSD is attached to an internal PCIe card. I was reading in another thread how another person was able to use the same Apricorn Velocity Solo X2 PCIe card with their SSD along with the Sapphire Radeon Pulse RX 580 with no problems, so I’m not sure what the issue is here?

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/will-this-pcie-ssd-sata-3-card-work.2173053/#post-27172925

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/caution-10-14-6-sata-pcie-ssds-via-adapter.2191023/

 

[greg97]

Ok, another good news bad news situation! I GOT IT TO WORK! ONCE!! lol
So here's what I did...I decided to try my computer one more time in its original configuration (SSD Home drive in PCIe slot, Time Machine HDD in SATA slot 1, HDD Mass storage HDD in SATA slot 2) and fired it up. It worked! I thought it was the fact that I removed that High Sierra boot drive from SATA slot 1 that might have been interfering. I then shut it down and tried to reboot just to see if it would work again. NO success. Tried a few times along with a SMC/PRAM reset to see if that would help, but no luck. It would appear that the Apricorn Velocity Solo X2 PCIe card just doesn't want to play nice with the Sapphire Pulse RX 580! And according to the link from @crjackson2134 above, other people are having this issue as well. However in their case they are running Mojave and I'm still on High Sierra, but I guess that doesn't seem to be the only issue....
So in order to get my MP up and running again, I figured I'd put the SSD in the empty CD/DVD SATA slot (where it had worked fine before), left the two HDD where they were in SATA slots 1 and 2, and fired it up. NO GO! I tried one on its own, then the other, to see if it was the drives (both are fairly new 8TB HDDs, one is a Seagate Barracuda Pro, the other a WD I shucked from an enclosure). Then I tried each one externally (using the SATA card from the shucked enclosure), and each one worked!
So this is really got me baffled....the fact that the SSD did work once with the PCIe card, and now won't (which I can live with until I get another PCIe card that WILL work), and the fact that the only way I can get get my computer half working is with the SSD in a SATA slot, and the others only externally??? Any idea how I can get my HDDs to work internally again? Thanks!

 

[crjackson2134]

Any idea how I can get my HDDs to work internally again? Thanks!

There’s a whole other thread dedicated to large capacity drives not working reliably in the cMP slots. Search around for that.