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MP 1,1-5,1 SOLVED Opencore on MacPro 5,1 after NVRAM reset

S

Stevenyo

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 2, 2020
310
478
Hello,

I've got a 4,1 mac pro with flashed firmware and many other upgrades. I was happily running Opencore and using the boot picker to swap between Mojave and Windows 10 with no issues.

I was loving this machine so much (recent rescue and upgrade, my Dad bought it new in 2009 when he was into editing HD video and abandoned it in his home office in 2013 when he got a rMBP), that I bought an upgrade kit for the wifi/BT to get handoff and more.

After installing the new wireless card, I can't get wifi to connect (the mac sees the wifi card, the card sees networks, but it can't connect). The seller I bought the kit from suggested I reset the NVRAM after the upgrade.

Being such an opencore/hackintosh newb, I did not know this would apparently destroy my opencore set up. I no longer get a boot screen. My NVMe main drive shows as external again even in Mojave, GPU Acceleration is gone (0-5% GPU usage on tasks like 4k60 imovie export).

I'm sure I need to either reinstall or restart my opencore setup, but I'm not sure what is still installed or where or how to do that and don't want to make anything worse. I couldn't figure out what to do in this situation, my searching for advice turned up plenty of discussions about NVRAM and opencore not playing nice, but nothing that seemed like my exact situation enough to plan a course of action.

Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks!
 
Stevenyo said:
Hello,

I've got a 4,1 mac pro with flashed firmware and many other upgrades. I was happily running Opencore and using the boot picker to swap between Mojave and Windows 10 with no issues.

I was loving this machine so much (recent rescue and upgrade, my Dad bought it new in 2009 when he was into editing HD video and abandoned it in his home office in 2013 when he got a rMBP), that I bought an upgrade kit for the wifi/BT to get handoff and more.

After installing the new wireless card, I can't get wifi to connect (the mac sees the wifi card, the card sees networks, but it can't connect). The seller I bought the kit from suggested I reset the NVRAM after the upgrade.

Being such an opencore/hackintosh newb, I did not know this would apparently destroy my opencore set up. I no longer get a boot screen. My NVMe main drive shows as external again even in Mojave, GPU Acceleration is gone (0-5% GPU usage on tasks like 4k60 imovie export).

I'm sure I need to either reinstall or restart my opencore setup, but I'm not sure what is still installed or where or how to do that and don't want to make anything worse. I couldn't figure out what to do in this situation, my searching for advice turned up plenty of discussions about NVRAM and opencore not playing nice, but nothing that seemed like my exact situation enough to plan a course of action.

Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks!
Click to expand...
OK, nevermind, just went and set the right boot EFI and such and it works again. Looking for how to delete the thread
 
I think it's good to keep this thread. I see this question every few weeks.

Anyway, if setup correctly, OpenCore should able to stay even after NVRAM reset.

I suggest you perform a 3x NVRAM reset. If OpenCore disabled again, then mount the EFI partition and bless it again.

As long as RequestBootVarRouting is enabled. NVRAM reset should not affect OpenCore.
 
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h9826790 said:
I think it's good to keep this thread. I see this question every few weeks.

Anyway, if setup correctly, OpenCore should able to stay even after NVRAM reset.

I suggest you perform a 3x NVRAM reset. If OpenCore disabled again, then mount the EFI partition and bless it again.

As long as RequestBootVarRouting is enabled. NVRAM reset should not affect OpenCore.
Click to expand...
I had RequestBootVarRouting enabled in 0.6.3, but NVRAM reset got me a no start (circle/slash) bootup screen on Big Sur. This is a Mac mini that doesn't have a Mojave fallback option. How do I rebless the USB EFI on this machine?
 
mangombia said:
I had RequestBootVarRouting enabled in 0.6.3, but NVRAM reset got me a no start (circle/slash) bootup screen on Big Sur. This is a Mac mini that doesn't have a Mojave fallback option. How do I rebless the USB EFI on this machine?
Click to expand...
I am really not sure if Mac mini behave the same.

Anyway, make a macOS / OSX USB installer (whichever version that the Mac mini can boot).

Then you can boot to that installer, and re-bless OpenCore in terminal.
 
h9826790 said:
I am really not sure if Mac mini behave the same.

Anyway, make a macOS / OSX USB installer (whichever version that the Mac mini can boot).

Then you can boot to that installer, and re-bless OpenCore in terminal.
Click to expand...
Yeah, pretty much the same. Here are the steps for reference purposes:

1. Get your Mojave install USB and put it in.
2. Hold-Option (ALT) at boot until you see the boot choices & choose "Install MacOS Mojave"
3. Open terminal from the Utilities Menu Item.
4. Type: "diskutil list" to get a list of the disks and note the one which has your OC EFI (e.g., "/dev/disk23").
5. Type: "diskutil mountDisk [**your OC EFI disk**]".
6. Type: "bless -mount /Volumes/EFI -setBoot".
7. Type: "reboot".

On reboot you should be back to the OC bootpicker. This still doesn't resolve the issue of having set the RequestBootVarRouting to true as Borking my OC on NVRAM reset.
 
mangombia said:
Yeah, pretty much the same. Here are the steps for reference purposes:

1. Get your Mojave install USB and put it in.
2. Hold-Option (ALT) at boot until you see the boot choices & choose "Install MacOS Mojave"
3. Open terminal from the Utilities Menu Item.
4. Type: "diskutil list" to get a list of the disks and note the one which has your OC EFI (e.g., "/dev/disk23").
5. Type: "diskutil mountDisk [**your OC EFI disk**]".
6. Type: "bless -mount /Volumes/EFI -setBoot".
7. Type: "reboot".

On reboot you should be back to the OC bootpicker. This still doesn't resolve the issue of having set the RequestBootVarRouting to true as Borking my OC on NVRAM reset.
Click to expand...
On the Mac mini, you should able to simply hold option to boot, and select EFI, then boot to OpenCore.

On cMP, we need OC to stay after NVRAM reset, because we use OpenCore to provide the boot screen.
 
I hear you, but it is my understanding that you cannot bless an OC EFI if you are booted into OC. Since it wasn't recognizing that OC EFI after the NVRAM reset I would have had to boot into some clean environment in order to bless it. At least I think all that is true - I could be wrong.
 
mangombia said:
I hear you, but it is my understanding that you cannot bless an OC EFI if you are booted into OC. Since it wasn't recognizing that OC EFI after the NVRAM reset I would have had to boot into some clean environment in order to bless it. At least I think all that is true - I could be wrong.
Click to expand...
You can bless OC even you boot via OC indeed.

As long as you disable SIP permanently in the OpenCore config. Then even after NVRAM reset, you can simply option boot to OpenCore, and re-bless OpenCore itself.
 
Stevenyo said:
Hello,

I've got a 4,1 mac pro with flashed firmware and many other upgrades. I was happily running Opencore and using the boot picker to swap between Mojave and Windows 10 with no issues.

I was loving this machine so much (recent rescue and upgrade, my Dad bought it new in 2009 when he was into editing HD video and abandoned it in his home office in 2013 when he got a rMBP), that I bought an upgrade kit for the wifi/BT to get handoff and more.

After installing the new wireless card, I can't get wifi to connect (the mac sees the wifi card, the card sees networks, but it can't connect). The seller I bought the kit from suggested I reset the NVRAM after the upgrade.

Being such an opencore/hackintosh newb, I did not know this would apparently destroy my opencore set up. I no longer get a boot screen. My NVMe main drive shows as external again even in Mojave, GPU Acceleration is gone (0-5% GPU usage on tasks like 4k60 imovie export).

I'm sure I need to either reinstall or restart my opencore setup, but I'm not sure what is still installed or where or how to do that and don't want to make anything worse. I couldn't figure out what to do in this situation, my searching for advice turned up plenty of discussions about NVRAM and opencore not playing nice, but nothing that seemed like my exact situation enough to plan a course of action.

Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks!
Click to expand...
I just did this to myself and can't figure how to get out of it! I'm confused how you were able to re-select the correct EFI or re-bless the drive as without OC the system is running blind.

I do have other computers that I can use to fix the issue remotely if it can be done on the system drive or EFI partition itself.
 
Hi,

I have the exact same issue. I reset NVRAM and can't recover. If booting my Mac Pro normally it boots directly into Windows. I tried a bootable Mojave and Catalina (I'm running Big Sur) USB stick to boot up with Option key but no luck. Fans ramp up but no boot options. Turning on and off just boots into Windows without an issue. I tried 3 reset NVRAMs as well. Nothing. What am I missing?

Thanks for any help...
 
Ieziebie said:
Hi,

I have the exact same issue. I reset NVRAM and can't recover. If booting my Mac Pro normally it boots directly into Windows. I tried a bootable Mojave and Catalina (I'm running Big Sur) USB stick to boot up with Option key but no luck. Fans ramp up but no boot options. Turning on and off just boots into Windows without an issue. I tried 3 reset NVRAMs as well. Nothing. What am I missing?

Thanks for any help...
Click to expand...
If you still have a MAC EFI GPU (GT120 or AMD 5770 or such) you could put that in and do the Option key boot procedure. If not, then pull all your drives and only leaving the bootable USB available. If you're not using a MAC EFI GPU, and OC is not loading, you're not going to see a choice with which to boot from, even using the Option Key. If that works, then you can put in a drive with MacOS Mojave or earlier installed (and only the drive with MacOS) and boot to that. Then do the whole OC mount-EFI, bless kabuki dance again. If it boots to a picker you're gold.

One word of warning -- because you've booted multiple times directly to Win10 without OC you've probably written Windows security certificates to your BootROM and are well on the way to a corrupted BootROM. You need to reach out on here for assistance reflashing a clean BootROM image.

Which brings me to a word of caution for all OC users who have Win10 in their scheme: Make sure you have a Mojave (or earlier) natively bootable version of MacOS FIRST or at least ahead of Win10 in your boot order in case OC goes south for any reason. Others can chime in here if I'm incorrect, but I think the cMP will first boot from the drive saved in NVRAM, but if that is not available it goes to the SATA drives (1>4), then to USB/FireWire, then to PCIe, then to Netboot. I made the mistake of leaving a bootable Win10 in SATA2 after removing the OC USB and doing an NVRAM reset, so even though I had Mojave first in the order on my PCIe rail, it still booted to Win10. One of these days I'll move Win10 off that SATA drive to an NVME (or abandon it altogether), but for now I pull that drive before taking OC out.
 
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mangombia said:
If you still have a MAC EFI GPU (GT120 or AMD 5770 or such) you could put that in and do the Option key boot procedure. If not, then pull all your drives and only leaving the bootable USB available. If you're not using a MAC EFI GPU, and OC is not loading, you're not going to see a choice with which to boot from, even using the Option Key. If that works, then you can put in a drive with MacOS Mojave or earlier installed (and only the drive with MacOS) and boot to that. Then do the whole OC mount-EFI, bless kabuki dance again. If it boots to a picker you're gold.

One word of warning -- because you've booted multiple times directly to Win10 without OC you've probably written Windows security certificates to your BootROM and are well on the way to a corrupted BootROM. You need to reach out on here for assistance reflashing a clean BootROM image.

Which brings me to a word of caution for all OC users who have Win10 in their scheme: Make sure you have a Mojave (or earlier) natively bootable version of MacOS FIRST or at least ahead of Win10 in your boot order in case OC goes south for any reason. Others can chime in here if I'm incorrect, but I think the cMP will first boot from the drive saved in NVRAM, but if that is not available it goes to the SATA drives (1>4), then to USB/FireWire, then to PCIe, then to Netboot. I made the mistake of leaving a bootable Win10 in SATA2 after removing the OC USB and doing an NVRAM reset, so even though I had Mojave first in the order on my PCIe rail, it still booted to Win10. One of these days I'll move Win10 off that SATA drive to an NVME (or abandon it altogether), but for now I pull that drive before taking OC out.
Click to expand...
This exact thing just happened to me. I have an old backup of my BootROM. How can I see if I need to restore it? I have everything back up and running as of now but want to know how to see if I need to restore the old BootROM to avoid future issues
 
14dcutaneo said:
This exact thing just happened to me. I have an old backup of my BootROM. How can I see if I need to restore it? I have everything back up and running as of now but want to know how to see if I need to restore the old BootROM to avoid future issues
Click to expand...
you can try my dumper/analyzer. Also it has a tool for checking an already made dump (test_nvram).

Dropbox - File Deleted - Simplify your life

www.dropbox.com www.dropbox.com
 
Macschrauber said:
Check security & privacy control panel, maybe it needs new kext aproval.

what OS exactly?
Click to expand...
I have the same problem as OP as well as the windows boot issue. I pulled all my drives and booted into Mojave and ran your script. It shows I have Windows certificates in my bootrom. I’m not sure that I have a backup anymore. At least not that I can find :eek::eek:. Can anyone help me in the right direction? Can the certs be purged somehow?
 
snowin said:
View attachment 1987000
Click to expand...
Remove your screenshot, to this day people that make hackintoshes grab the SSN to use it for Messages logins, never publicly post it.

To answer you question, if you don't have a previously saved dump before Windows SecureBoot signed your BootROM, you will need a BootROM reconstruction service.

The Windows SecureBoot signing itself won't directly brick your Mac when you already have a BootROM newer than MP51.0087.B00 (you already have 144.0.0.0.0), but will greatly affect the functionality of the circular log and could cause a brick when a Software Update payload/staging is bigger than the available space after the SecureBoot signing, a thing that happened last month with Monterey 12.3/12.3.1 and BigSur 11.6.5 and probably will happen in the near future again.
 
Thanks tsialex - screenshot removed. I will keep looking - I do rememeber following the instructions and running dosdudes application, but so far can't find anything. I'm glad to know it is not immediate impending doom. I'm assuming a BootROM reconstruction involves removing/replacing chips like your posts elsewhere?
 
snowin said:
Thanks tsialex - screenshot removed. I will keep looking - I do rememeber following the instructions and running dosdudes application, but so far can't find anything. I'm glad to know it is not immediate impending doom. I'm assuming a BootROM reconstruction involves removing/replacing chips like your posts elsewhere?
Click to expand...
No, that's the procedure for when the SPI flash itself fails, you are not at this stage. I'll sent the info by PM.
 
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