MP 1,1-5,1 NVME Support for Windows 10 in MP 5.1

[Aryan-x86]

Hi gentlemen,

I have a Mac Pro 4.1, flashed to 5.1
32GB RAM, single X5690, USB 3 PCI card
I have a MacVidCards MSI GeForce GTX 970 GAMING 4G that supports the boot screen.

And I HAD a cheap SATA SSD. It failed on me a week ago. Luckily I was able to make a full backup by making an image with Macrium Reflect. So have all my partitions. I had OS X 10.13.6 17G66 High Sierra and Windows 10 using Bootcamp.

Now I am wondering if it's possible to use an NVME SSD with a PCIe adapter. I have a 1TB ADATA XPG 8200 Pro and I found in another thread that this SSD is supported (https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/pcie-ssds-nvme-ahci.2146725/)

When plugging in the NVME Drive, Windows 10 recognizes it in Disk Management. Now I'm a little confused on what to do next. I hear that I should ugrade to Mojave for BootROM 140.0.0.0.0+, which supports NVME. Now is this only for MacOS, or do I need BootROM for Windows 10 as well? And is this BootROM needed to boot automatically from the NVME SSD, or to boot at all (So can I boot from the BIOS by repeatedly pressing ALT during the boot, and selecting my NVME Drive, without upgrading my BootROM to 140.0.0.0.0??)

I believe my GTX 970 doesn't have support for the Metal graphics API. So do I have to buy a Metal compatible graphics card to install Mojave. Would I have to keep using that graphics card to boot to Mojave / Windows 10? That would take away the boot screen, which I prefer to keep.

What if I ONLY copy the Windows 10 partition to my NVME SSD, and move everything else to an HDD, would I now be able to boot from Windows 10 by selecting the NVME in the bios?

Or maybe use it for a Debian install, would that be possible?

Does anybody have any guides/suggestions/tips??

Thanks

 

[Borowski]

Don't boot Windows in UEFI mode, this might destroy your bootrom. UEFI startup is necessary for Windows booting from NVMe-SSD.

Only way to avoid this issue is to install OC-bootloader, which protect the firmware.

 

[Mike Richardson]

Don't boot Windows in UEFI mode, this might destroy your bootrom. UEFI startup is necessary for Windows booting from NVMe-SSD.

Only way to avoid this issue is to install OC-bootloader, which protect the firmware.

Is OC-bootloader different from OCLP?

 

[Mike Richardson]

Wait what the f**?

 

[Aryan-x86]

Don't boot Windows in UEFI mode, this might destroy your bootrom. UEFI startup is necessary for Windows booting from NVMe-SSD.

Only way to avoid this issue is to install OC-bootloader, which protect the firmware.

Thank you for your insightful respond! I'll install OC in that case.

 

[tsialex]

NVMe is only supported AFTER your MacPro already have 14x.0.0.0.0 BootROM, period.

If you still don't have it, the firmware completely ignores the NVMe drive and you can't boot anything from it, meaning whatever OS installed, you can't boot from it unless the firmware supports it.

Windows only supports NVMe with UEFI installs, a legacy/BIOS/CSM Windows install can't boot from NVMe. Since MacPro5,1 is not a UEFI compatible PC, you need to protect the BootROM from Windows UEFI SecureBoot signing or you will corrupt the BootROM bricking the MacPro. You can use OpenCore ProtectSecureBoot to avoid this issue.

NVIDIA GTX 970 is a METAL supported card, but since is a MAXWELL based GPU that requires and only works with NVIDIA webdrivers, is only supported up to High Sierra. For any newer macOS release you gonna need a another GPU.