cMP 5,1 fails to install HC firmware

[adam9c1]

I have a 2010 cMP 5,1

I am booting off of High Sierra 10.13.2 installer.
I have a Crucial SSD drive installed in drive bay 1.
I am asked to power down the machine to install firmware update. I press OK to shut down and I get a beachball. Beachball goes away. I power down pressing the power button.

I boot up and hold the power button and see power light flash and long beep.
Machine boots up to the installer and again it asks me to update firmware....

Thoughts?

 

[h9826790]

1) Do you have a Mac EFI GPU?
2) Did you try to just run the installer from the SSD?

 

[adam9c1]

The machine has a OEM Mac GPU.
The SSD was blank.

I've installed 10.12 and then launched MAS and set to download.
The machine restarted and optical drive opened up.
I'm now in 10.12 installing/downloading 10.13.

 

[saulinpa]

It's really finicky. After the beachball goes away try the shutdown through the menu.

 

[adam9c1]

The beachball went away and I would press the button to shut down and nothing so I did a hard shut down with the power button.
Then long press to turn on (until light flashes and long tone).

After the second attempt like this, I gave up and installed 10.12 then up to 10.13.

 

[saulinpa]

So did you eventually get 10.13 running?

Similar happened to me the first few times. But after using the pull-down menu it worked.

 

[Dr. Stealth]

I have a 2010 cMP 5,1

I am booting off of High Sierra 10.13.2 installer.
I have a Crucial SSD drive installed in drive bay 1.
I am asked to power down the machine to install firmware update. I press OK to shut down and I get a beachball. Beachball goes away. I power down pressing the power button.

I boot up and hold the power button and see power light flash and long beep.
Machine boots up to the installer and again it asks me to update firmware....

Thoughts?

Check System Profiler to see if the update actually occurred. It sounds like it did. After I updated my firmware the HS installer also came back and wanted me to update the firmware, which was already done successfully.

 

[adam9c1]

When I ran the firmware update from the 10.13 installer there was no way for me to bypass it the second time around thus I went the 10.12 route and upgraded that to 10.13.

 

[Intell]

The problem may be that you're trying to run the firmware update from the USB drive. You've got to update the firmware from an internal drive.

 

[adam9c1]

All I had connected was a blank SSD in slot1
High Sierra installer on a USB disk
Booted form the USB disk

So that above failed
I then booted from USB 10.12 installer, and installed that and the downloaded 10.13.

 

[Intell]

Because you were booted from an external source and attempted to install the firmware update from that, it failed. This is how firmware updates work on older Intell based Macs that cannot update the firmware without user intervention.

 

[pigsyn]

The problem may be that you're trying to run the firmware update from the USB drive. You've got to update the firmware from an internal drive.

I did the firmware upgrade this way, using a High Sierra USB boot key.
You just need to format a blank disk or ssd to HFS+ before starting the installation process.(mandatory)

The only problem is that you can't click on shutdown when the firmware upgrade instruction window shows up.(pbly a bug)
Quit installation and select shutdown from apple menu and then restart by pushing power button until it blinks.

 

[Intell]

That is an unsupported method of performing the update and it may not work most times.

 

[LightBulbFun]

That is an unsupported method of performing the update and it may not work most times.

unsupported or not booting from a High Si USB stick worked for me when it came to doing the FW update on my 4,1-5,1

what I noticed is that it does not use the USB stick to do the FW update, but that it places the FW update files onto the EFI partition of the internal hard disk/SSD and then the Mac Pro updates from the internal drives EFI partition, rather then the USB and by that sense, id say it is supported since the USB stick is not being used to do the actual FW update.

 

[FrancoisC]

You need to have your internal disk partitioned/formatted, as the firmware update file will be copied and loaded from the hidden EFI partition on it. You don't need to have an OS installed, just erase it and it should be fine next boot.
[doublepost=1514338337][/doublepost]Also, if the high sierra installer don't let you access disk utility, try booting from an older installer or use any drive with an OS on it, only make sure it's internal.