Ati hd 2600 xt not working with original firmware

[superg3]

Hi all,

Congrats for this great forum!

I'm a 2008 Mac Pro owner with an ATI 2600 XT.
After reading this forum I decided to flash the GPU to experiment.

1-First I backup the original "MAC" Firmware with GPU-Z.
2-I burned a Bootable XP CD with Atiflash tool and the Mac and Pc firmwares.
3-Flashed the GPU with PC bios.

At this point I can boot in Windows 7 partition ok. Obviously not in OS X.

4- Booted again with the Bootable CD and flashed the GPU with the backed up original Mac firmware.

I suposed that I could boot again on Os X, but not.

Now I can see only video when I boot from the bootable XP cd. I can not boot on the windows 7 partition because I don't have video on startup and cant select the windows partition...

I have two questions:

¿do you know why Mac Pro doesn't recognize the GPU if I flashed it again with the original Mac firmware?

As I have not video on start up, ¿do you know some way to force Mac Pro to boot from windows 7 partition?

Thank you very much for your Help

 

[superg3]

No answers?

 

[rtrt]

a

 

[superg3]

Thank you rtrt.

I've tried with arrows and enter but no success.

 

[alphaod]

I'm confused… did you flash your Mac card to a non-EFI firmware?

 

[Cindori]

set windows in startup disk.

 

[superg3]

I'm confused… did you flash your Mac card to a non-EFI firmware?

Yes, but after I flashed it with the original EFI.

 

[superg3]

set windows in startup disk.

I can't do it. I don't have video output, and if I try it the system doesn,t start.

 

[rtrt]

a

 

[nanofrog]

You could try flashing it with EFI again, but I'm thinking the backup you made is incomplete (protected portion in the ROM was never copied, then re-written during the PC BIOS flash). So when you tried to flashing the EFI firmware back, that missing data is causing it to fail during the OS X boot process.

Assuming this is the case, you've killed it. You could see if a Genius at the Apple Store could restore the firmware properly, as it's worth a shot before going out and getting a new card. But you may not have a choice.

Sorry it's not better news.

 

[666sheep]

nano, it's not that easy to kill the card by flashing it Luckily we have TME ROMs database (endless THX for all Strangedogs squad).

OP, flash your card with this ROM and you should be fine.

 

[nanofrog]

nano, it's not that easy to kill the card by flashing it Luckily we have TME ROMs database (endless THX for all Strangedogs squad).

OP, flash your card with this ROM and you should be fine.

I'm under the impression the 2600XT was an OEM card for Apple (not available through 3rd party retail channels), so it seemed reasonable to me that such a situation is possible (i.e. different start address <offset> than what ATI would normally have used for the PC versions).

I just don't recall ATI graphics cards being available in non-Apple owned/controlled retail channels until the 3870.