MP 1,1-5,1 Mac Pro 1.1/2.1 AHCI m.2

[MoerBoer]

I have a spare 1.1 flashed to 2.1 running El Capitan , Fedora 34 and PopOS.

Everything is working swimmingly with each of the above being on it's own SSD.
I have a spare AHCI M.2 blade that I used to use in my Mac Pro 5.1 which was upgraded to a faster NVME later on ( When firmware 144 came out ). I've stuck it in the MacPro 2.1 with the PCIe card and I can see it and even though the speed is not great for the M.2 , it's by far the fastest drive in the machine getting +- 700MB/s transfer speeds.

Is there any way of booting any operating system off it with something like ReFind? I heard rumors it might be possible to boot Windows 10 from it?

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

I'm curious about this option, too. As cMP1,1 does not boot from USB, we need to work on SSD, a small volume will do.
I would do like below:
1. Add a small partition volume on the El Capitan SSD, or add a new small physical SSD. Install rEFInd on it.
2. Boot to rEFInd to see if it can see the nVME volume. If it can't, inject nVME kext to the folders and drivers for Wndows.

A guide to using rEFInd on macOS

A guide to using rEFInd on macOS. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

gist.github.com

 

[MoerBoer]

With the silence in this thread, I suppose it's not possible.

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

With the silence in this thread, I suppose it's not possible.

It's possible on a Windows PC (USB boot with Refind, then read from nVME AHCI blade)
why it's not possible on a Mac pro? (HDD boot with Refind, then read from nVME AHCI blade)
Do you still remember how you flashed the SMC to turn your cMP 1,1 to a 2,1?

 

[MoerBoer]

I've installed Refind on my El Capitan instance and it's working great. I can see all the other OS's from Refind but not my CCC to the AHCI blade.

I'm assuming it's a firmware thing where the 1.2 / 2.1 can't boot from PCI

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

I've installed Refind on my El Capitan instance and it's working great. I can see all the other OS's from Refind but not my CCC to the AHCI blade.

I'm assuming it's a firmware thing where the 1.2 / 2.1 can't boot from PCI

You need to inject a kext for Refind to load the necessary driver for NVME drives.

 

[MoerBoer]

You need to inject a kext for Refind to load the necessary driver for NVME drives.

Can you supply more information please?

I've tried the NVME efi driver but no go.

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

I haven't tried it yet, but you can take reference from the following links, although they are for Windows PCs only. Check the 6 sticky posts.

NVMe Support for old Systems

Guides with and without BIOS Modding

www.win-raid.com

 

[MoerBoer]

I haven't tried it yet, but you can take reference from the following links, although they are for Windows PCs only. Check the 6 sticky posts.

NVMe Support for old Systems

Guides with and without BIOS Modding

www.win-raid.com

Oh wow, so you haven't even done this yourself on a Mac Pro 1.1/2.1?

You can't just say because it works on Windows it will work on the bare mac hardware. Thanks for wasting my time.

 

[Nguyen Duc Hieu]

Oh wow, so you haven't even done this yourself on a Mac Pro 1.1/2.1?

You can't just say because it works on Windows it will work on the bare mac hardware. Thanks for wasting my time.

You are welcome.
I thought you were happy to waste your time toying with old hardware.

If you are bold enough to try new technology on old hardware, time is not the only thing you will waste.

 

[MoerBoer]

You are welcome.
I thought you were happy to waste your time toying with old hardware.

If you are bold enough to try new technology on old hardware, time is not the only thing you will waste.

I have no problem wasting time and tinkering to try new things, I do have a problem with wasting time reading links posted not relevant to the problem at hand.

And yes, I've flashed the machine, replaced CPU's and flashed a Windows HD5770 card with a Mac bios. So not scared to get my hands dirty. I have tried everything I can ( as my 5.1 also has 2 nvme blades in it ), so I thought I would ask if someone has *ACTUALLY* done it themselves and not just speculation posts.

 

[KeesMacPro]

Perhaps this thread may give you some leads about how to get this working (starting at post #17).
Note that at the time this post was written, the NVMe native support wasn't released yet for the MP 5,1 IIRC

updating a Mac (Pro)s CPU Microcode

I Just wanted to make a Quick posting that I managed to update the Microcode on my MacBook2,1 to the latest version intel has released for its CPU :) I managed to do this by dumping my MacBooks BootROM using flashrom in Linux and actually manually finding the microcode in the BootROM (which in...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[MoerBoer]

I've tried everything I can, but I can't get it to boot from the blade, I even tried with Linux making the boot partition on one drive and '/' on the nvme, but alas.

I ended up installing 11.6 on a SSD, and then moved my Home folder to the NVME ( changed home's location after the fact ), and then with csrutil disable, copied my Applications to the NVME as well. Wiped the old Applications folder on the SSD and created a new symlink to the blade.

It's running really nicely, so I suppose it's as fast as it's going to get.

 

[KeesMacPro]

deleted.