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Bricked after Sierra install - MacPro 5,1

F

fredr500

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 12, 2007
227
19
I have a MacPro 5,1 with 2 4TB internal drives and a 250GB SSD plugged in to a third party controller, booting from the SSD. 3 monitors connected.

Previous versions have been fine, update proceeds normally.

After update it bongs, gives me the loading screen then puts the loading screen in a portion of one monitor, other monitors have grey or black windows and it hangs.

No keyboard modifiers seem to work - reset SMC, PRAM, Recovers, Shift, Option.

If I disconnect the SSD it finds an old 10.7 install that it boots to just fine.

My plan for tonight:
Build a bootable USB
Reconnected the SSD
Plug the keyboard in to the front directly, not through a hub.
Try option boot and run from the USB.

Failing that I can format the SSD in another box (backed up before the install) and try a clean install.

Any other suggestions? Or anything that I overlooked that would be an easy fix?
 
I have a MacPro 5,1 (mid 2010) with a 1 TB EVO SSD mounted to a Velocity X2 PCI card. Last time I updated I had to move the SSD to the Optical Bay connector so the installer could find the system to update. I will be updating mine later to day. Just finished making a clone.
 
I'll try that. I had no success last night, when I try to boot from the USB with or without the SSDs connected I just sat with a white screen after selecting the USB drive to boot from.

Today I used that same USB drive on a MacBook Pro, it booted right up. I went ahead and installed it on a USB drive so I'll see if I can boot from it tonight.

With he keyboard plugged in the front I can option boot to a drive select screen so maybe I'll be able to boot from this external.

If these fail my next move is to put an internal drive into a USB dock and install from the macbook to it and plug in.

I thought this was supposed to be easy?
 
Another evening with no success. So the last thing I did was stick a 160GB drive in a USB dock connected to my mini and started a Sierra install to that. Tonight will remove all disks and see if that will boot.
 
I did not remove my SSD from the PCI card. I Just downloaded and installed the Sierra update directly onto my Samsung EVO 1 TB SSD mounted on a Velocity X2 PCI card. Very smooth update. Since the last time I tried a major system update I sent my Velocity back and had the drivers updated and updated the driver on the SSD. This time my the update saw my SSD boot drive and worked as needed.

You did not mention which SSD or PCI SSD adapter you were using. They may need driver updates or they may not be compatible with the installer.

I did disconnect all other devices and made a clone first. In the process of making the clone I realized how slow my classic MacPro was with a actual hard drive.
 
Why make it so complicated? You can boot from the 10.7,run the Sierra installer at there, and just choose the SSD as the destination. No need to make / use a bootable USB drive.

Did you ever try to put the SSD back to the optical bay? For OS upgrade, it may be better to connect the SSD via a native SATA 2 port. The installer may want to (re-)create the recovery partition, sometimes this cause the problem if the SSD is mounted on a PCIe card.

Anyway, I assume you plug the bootable USB drive into one of the native USB 2.0 port, correct?
 
I stripped everything out of my Mac Pro except the video card. I took a 160GB drive, connected to my Mac Mini with a USB dock and installed Sierra on it. Went through the setup, rebooted from it, it ran fine (if a bit slow on USB2).

Plugged that same drive as the only drive into my Pro and it would no boot, all I got was a white screen. Cmd-R does nothing. Option brings up the boot menu, selecting the drive gives a blank screen.

I found a drive with 10.8.x on it, that boots fine. I tried to install Sierra in a separate partition on it, same thing, always boots to a white screen.

I have a genius appointment on Thursday, we'll see what they can do.
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h9826790 said:
Why make it so complicated? You can boot from the 10.7,run the Sierra installer at there, and just choose the SSD as the destination. No need to make / use a bootable USB drive.

Did you ever try to put the SSD back to the optical bay? For OS upgrade, it may be better to connect the SSD via a native SATA 2 port. The installer may want to (re-)create the recovery partition, sometimes this cause the problem if the SSD is mounted on a PCIe card.

Anyway, I assume you plug the bootable USB drive into one of the native USB 2.0 port, correct?
Click to expand...

Booting from 10.7 and running the installer hangs on reboot. Holding option on the reboot lets me choose the correct image but still hangs.

Yes, I put the SSD in the optical bay and got the same results.

The bootable USB drive was plugged in the front of the machine. I tried a USB install image, I tried an external drive with Sierra already installed, and I tried with a USB drive with the Sierra install app, all just end with a blank screen (even let it sit overnight).
 
rjtiedeman said:
If you are running the installer from a Mac Mini doesn't the installer install a system customized for a Mac Mini not a Mac Pro?
Click to expand...

MacOS should be universal, one of the work around to install Sierra on unsupported Mac is actually by using target disk mode.
 
crjackson2134 said:
I THINK it's a videocard issue. Tell us about your video setup. I had the same problem a while back & a videocard upgrade was my fix.
Click to expand...

Totally possible. One of the big change in Sierra is MacOS now load the GPU driver before the Apple logo appear. That means if something wrong with the GPU (either hardware / software), it makes perfect sense that only shows a white screen.
 
Last edited:
That makes sense. I have 2 video adapters, one is the stock card, the other came from Apple. I haven't touched the machine in a couple days so haven't had a chance to check them out and post back. I'm off to the genius tonight, hopefully they will figure it out. If I didn't have the appointment I'd start chasing the video squirrel. I suppose I should have tried without the second card.
 
Dumb question, but you said you can boot into 10.7 if you unplug your SSD where Sierra is installed. You didn't mention it yet, but with the SSD unplugged, can you hold down the command key and get to the EFI bootloader? If keyboard combos work at boot without the SSD, you can also try a PRAM reset like you attempted before.

Assuming you can reach the bootloader with the drive unplugged, what behavior do you see if you attach the SSD while at the bootloader screen? Does it just hang? If not, when the SSD's volumes mount, check to see if OS X created the recovery partition successfully on the SSD, then try booting from it.

Whether you are in the recovery partition or simply have the SSD attached while booted off any other volume, try running disk repair.

Although this is kind of a massive jump in troubleshooting: If you manage to boot Sierra off this drive when attached to another Mac, you should enroll it in the beta program. We're now at 10.12.1 beta 3 and a lot of weird bugs have been squashed. Worth trying, but it's a delta update so it must be installed from a running install of Sierra.
 
Last edited:
fredr500 said:
I have a MacPro 5,1 with 2 4TB internal drives and a 250GB SSD plugged in to a third party controller, booting from the SSD. 3 monitors connected.
Click to expand...

Why in the world would you mess with the OS on a older mac with nonApple hardware?
 
I just returned from the Apple store. Evidently I tried everything BUT plugging in a single display into the NVidea card. That's what they did at the store and we loaded Sierra on with no problem.

Then we plugged an HDI display into the ATI Radeon HD5770 card and froze the system.

So it appears I can run 2 displays from the Nvdiea GForce GT620, I jut need to find a solution for the ATI Radeon to drive my HDMI display.

And if I ever decide to try to upgrade again it will be to a blank hard drive.
 
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