MP 1,1-5,1 MacPro5,1: BootROM thread | 144.0.0.0.0

[MrMagicMadMax]

I got my 970 EVO 2TB and it works great with bootrom 140.0.0.0.0 and High Sierra. It just takes a little longer to show the Apple logo and actually start booting than with the SM951.
To anyone wondering how to clone/upgrade, here is what I did:

I previously had the SM951 with 10.11.6 El Cap on it and my home folder on an 850 EVO installed on a SATA III Controller. I then did a fresh High Sierra Install on an old 1TB HDD. From there I upgraded my bootrom to 140.0.0.0.0. I then put a second 1TB HDD in the Mac Pro and used Disk utility in the freshly installed High Sierra to clone the system volume from the SM951 to that second 1TB HDD. You could also use a bootable Stick for that but I needed full OS X because my home folder was on the other SSD. After 10.11.6 was restored to the HDD I copied my home folder over to that same HDD and booted it. After setting the new location of my home folder and a reboot, permissions were broken so I ran "diskutil resetUserPermissions / `id -u`" to fix permissions and afterwards everything worked again. I then upgraded then removed the old SSDs and upgraded to High Sierra on the HDD to have a backup if anything went wrong. Luckily the upgrade worked fine. Now I put in my 970 EVO 2TB and booted the clean High Sierra install again, which prompted me to format the new drive. I made a mistake here by formatting with APFS. After restoring my upgraded High Sierra Install to it (which took about 4 hours for ~600GB) it wasn't bootable. So I reformatted it with Mac OS extended (journaled) and restored again. Now everything work perfectly!
I already have an RX 580 here. As soon as the power cable arrives, I will upgrade to Mojave which might also change the filesystem to APFS.

 

[yamstar]

Working well with the Apple_Injected NVMe ROM.

This is a stock ROM with no MODS, directly from Apple with preloaded NVMe support. It's official, we have it now

View attachment 793247

View attachment 793248

how are these speeds possible? I only get 1500mb/s in slot 1/2. I read that this is the max of pcie 2.0. how do you get 3000mb/s?

 

[tsialex]

how are these speeds possible? I only get 1500mb/s in slot 1/2. I read that this is the max of pcie 2.0. how do you get 3000mb/s?

HighPoint SSD7101-A has a PCIe switch that does the magic, read here Blade SSDs - NVMe & AHCI and here Highpoint 7101A - PCIe 3.0 SSD performance for the cMP.

 

[TC!!]

I have a Mac Pro 5,1 upgraded to 6 core 3.46 GHz. I'm using a Velocity Solo x2 card to boot from a Samsung 840 evo SSD. Following the great instructions here it's also running an RX 580 with Mojave 10.14.1.

After doing that upgrade I also bought a Samsung 970 Evo 500GB NVMe card which I installed using a StarTech M.2 adaptor with space for 3 M.2 cards 1 NVMe and 2 SSD. I found out after doing this that the 5,1 couldn't boot the NVMe which didn't bother me too much as I've been using it as a fast drive for Final Cut Pro. I also couldn't fit this in the slot directly above the RX 580 as the ability to add 2 M.2 drives underneath means it touches the RX580, what I'd read suggest I'm getting the same speed from Slot 3 as I would from Slot 2 anyway.

Now I've found this thread which shows I can get the most from the NVMe but I've been having big problems with my machine since last week, which MIGHT coincide with me upgrading to 10.14.1. My mac has started crashing, no restart just hangs with nothing being displayed, all USB devices are disconnected and bluetooth magic trackpad is off. The only way I can fix this is to hard reset, if I try to restart immediately it doesn't work. If I leave it for a couple of minutes then it boots with no chime. I say might coincide with 10.14.1 as it had been crashing and restarting since Mojave but last Friday I started experiencing this new behaviour.

This morning I've tried removing the NVMe in case this could be causing the problem. I know it gets very hot and that's the only thing I can think off which would require me to wait before being able to successfully restart. I know this is off topic for this thread but since so many people here are using NVMe I thought I might find someone with the same problem. I'm also wondering if me running 10.14.1 which seems to be more NVMe compatible alongside boot rom 138.0.0.0.0 which is less NVMe compatible could be causing my issue?

 

[tsialex]

I have a Mac Pro 5,1 upgraded to 6 core 3.46 GHz. I'm using a Velocity Solo x2 card to boot from a Samsung 840 evo SSD. Following the great instructions here it's also running an RX 580 with Mojave 10.14.1.

After doing that upgrade I also bought a Samsung 970 Evo 500GB NVMe card which I installed using a StarTech M.2 adaptor with space for 3 M.2 cards 1 NVMe and 2 SSD. I found out after doing this that the 5,1 couldn't boot the NVMe which didn't bother me too much as I've been using it as a fast drive for Final Cut Pro. I also couldn't fit this in the slot directly above the RX 580 as the ability to add 2 M.2 drives underneath means it touches the RX580, what I'd read suggest I'm getting the same speed from Slot 3 as I would from Slot 2 anyway.

Now I've found this thread which shows I can get the most from the NVMe but I've been having big problems with my machine since last week, which MIGHT coincide with me upgrading to 10.14.1. My mac has started crashing, no restart just hangs with nothing being displayed, all USB devices are disconnected and bluetooth magic trackpad is off. The only way I can fix this is to hard reset, if I try to restart immediately it doesn't work. If I leave it for a couple of minutes then it boots with no chime. I say might coincide with 10.14.1 as it had been crashing and restarting since Mojave but last Friday I started experiencing this new behaviour.

This morning I've tried removing the NVMe in case this could be causing the problem. I know it gets very hot and that's the only thing I can think off which would require me to wait before being able to successfully restart. I know this is off topic for this thread but since so many people here are using NVMe I thought I might find someone with the same problem. I'm also wondering if me running 10.14.1 which seems to be more NVMe compatible alongside boot rom 138.0.0.0.0 which is less NVMe compatible could be causing my issue?

To boot from NVMe you need to upgrade to 140.0.0.0.0, the first post on this thread has instructions.

Run AHT and check what is your problem, run the extended test, you can read how to download it from Apple install it into a USB-key from here https://github.com/upekkha/AppleHardwareTest

 

[TC!!]

To boot from NVMe you need to upgrade to 140.0.0.0.0, the first post on this thread has instructions.

Run AHT and check what is your problem, run the extended test, you can read how to download it from Apple install it into a USB-key from here https://github.com/upekkha/AppleHardwareTest

Thank you so much for all the help you're giving us. I've just done the Boot Rom upgrade to 140, downloading the AHT now. Do I need to put my old graphics card back in for that to run instead of my RX580?

Sorry but 1 more question, what's the best way to move my boot drive over from my SSD to the NVMe? Use something like Carbon Copy Cloner? I've not had a clean install of the OS for years, if I did want to start from scratch can I do a clean install of Mojave?

 

[bsbeamer]

Thank you so much for all the help you're giving us. I've just done the Boot Rom upgrade to 140, downloading the AHT now. Do I need to put my old graphics card back in for that to run instead of my RX580?

Sorry but 1 more question, what's the best way to move my boot drive over from my SSD to the NVMe? Use something like Carbon Copy Cloner? I've not had a clean install of the OS for years, if I did want to start from scratch can I do a clean install of Mojave?

Can use RX580 for firmware. And yes, CCC works great.

 

[tsialex]

Thank you so much for all the help you're giving us. I've just done the Boot Rom upgrade to 140, downloading the AHT now. Do I need to put my old graphics card back in for that to run instead of my RX580?

You need to install the original GPU to run AHT, usually newer GPUs or don't have the driver or get errors.

Sorry but 1 more question, what's the best way to move my boot drive over from my SSD to the NVMe? Use something like Carbon Copy Cloner? I've not had a clean install of the OS for years, if I did want to start from scratch can I do a clean install of Mojave?

CCC or SuperDuper!. I prefer to do a clean install every new major macOS release. After you upgrade your BootROM, you can do a clean install from USB, no problem with RX-580.

 

[MTBnBeer]

Is this the correct 1TB Samsung 970 EVO - NVMe PCIe M.2 stick for an Angelbird Wings PX1 PCIe x4 M.2 Adapter for our 2009 cMP 4,1->5,1 running Mojave 10.14.1 (boot rom 140.0.0.0) upgraded with dual 6-core 3.33 GHz Xeons and a MSI Gaming Radeon RX 560 128-bit 4GB GDRR5 video card ??? https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-970-EVO-1TB-MZ-V7E1T0BW/dp/B07BN217QG

What speed increase can we expect for this upgrade vs. our current Samsung 850 Pro SSD on our Apricom X2 Duo PCIe card?

Alternatively, would a Saumsung 960 EVO - NVMe PCIe M.2 stick that's $70 less be a bad choice vs. a 970 EVO - NVMe PCIe M.2 stick ?

 

[h9826790]

Is this the correct 1TB Samsung 970 EVO - NVMe PCIe M.2 stick for an Angelbird Wings PX1 PCIe x4 M.2 Adapter for our 2009 cMP 4,1->5,1 running Mojave 10.14.1 (boot rom 140.0.0.0) upgraded with dual 6-core 3.33 GHz Xeons and a MSI Gaming Radeon RX 560 128-bit 4GB GDRR5 video card ??? https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-970-EVO-1TB-MZ-V7E1T0BW/dp/B07BN217QG

What speed increase can we expect for this upgrade vs. our current Samsung 850 Pro SSD on our Apricom X2 Duo PCIe card?

Speed increase for file copying or booting? That can make a huge difference.

 

[MTBnBeer]

Speed increase for file copying or booting? That can make a huge difference.

More file copying & application use since this cMP is rock solid rarely requiring a reboot... usually because Adobe Acrobat XI Pro 11.0.23 (32-bit last non-subscription of Acrobat Pro) eventually slows to a crawl requiring cMP restart.

 

[h9826790]

More file copying & application use since this cMP is rock solid rarely requiring a reboot... usually because Adobe Acrobat XI Pro 11.0.23 (32-bit last non-subscription of Acrobat Pro) eventually slows to a crawl requiring cMP restart.

File copying is about 3x faster.

Apps loading should be more or less the same, unless there is a huge associated library.

 

[tsialex]

Just to document, when you run AHT, it saves the results into the first stream of the NVRAM volume, usually like this:

aht-results
<dict>
<key>_name</key>
<string>spdiags_aht_value</string>
<key>spdiags_last_run_key</key>
<date>4018-01-25T18:18:20Z</date>
<key>spdiags_result_key</key>
<string>spdiags_passed_value</string>
<key>spdiags_version_key</key>
<string>3A207</string>
<key>spdiags_loopcount_key</key>
<integer>1</integer>
</dict>

 

[LightBulbFun]

Just to document, when you run AHT, it saves the results into the first stream of the NVRAM volume, usually like this:

aht-results
<dict>
<key>_name</key>
<string>spdiags_aht_value</string>
<key>spdiags_last_run_key</key>
<date>4018-01-25T18:18:20Z</date>
<key>spdiags_result_key</key>
<string>spdiags_passed_value</string>
<key>spdiags_version_key</key>
<string>3A207</string>
<key>spdiags_loopcount_key</key>
<integer>1</integer>
</dict>

View attachment 803926

you can see the result of your AHT/ASD in system profiler under diagnostics too

 

[TC!!]

Just realised the blank screen I'm seeing when my Mac Pro is crashing might be a kernel panic. If you're using an RX580 do you see a kernel panic screen or is the screen just blank the same as no boot up screen?

Also ruled out the NVMe as I pulled it this morning to rule it out.

Edit: crap, I think I've found my problem, my 32GB of RAM is being reported as only 16GB.
Edit2: reinserted all my memory in reverse order now have 24GB, 3 crucial memory are working fine, 1 Samsung seems to have died

 

[tsialex]

Just realised the blank screen I'm seeing when my Mac Pro is crashing might be a kernel panic. If you're using an RX580 do you see a kernel panic screen or is the screen just blank the same as no boot up screen?

Also ruled out the NVMe as I pulled it this morning to rule it out.

Edit: crap, I think I've found my problem, my 32GB of RAM is being reported as only 16GB.
Edit2: reinserted all my memory in reverse order now have 24GB, 3 crucial memory are working fine, 1 Samsung seems to have died

Run AHT with your original GPU.
[doublepost=1542155280][/doublepost]You can install AHT into a usb-key, you can read instructions and links for AHT on Apple servers here: https://github.com/upekkha/AppleHardwareTest

 

[PeterHolbrook]

I've tried to read the initial pages and the last few pages of this thread trying to figure out how to upgrade the 138.0.0.0.0 Boot Rom of my Mac Pro 5,1 to 140.0.0.0.0, but it's very unclear to me. Perhaps I missed something important, but I don't know what. I'm already running Mojave 10.14.1. Isn't there a standalone ROM updater? If there isn't, how should I proceed? Should I download the full 10.14.1 installer? And then, do what? Reinstall 10.14.1? When, exactly will I be prompted to upgrade the ROM?

EDIT: I've just downloaded the fulll 10.14.1 installer from Apple. I've tried to run it, just in case it offered me to upgrade the ROM, but, curiously enough, it said it couldn't run, because my Mac must have a Metal-compatible card (it already has one) and FileVault shouldn't be in place (it isn't). How do I proceed? I know how to use Pacifist, et cetera. So, where is that updater?

 

[h9826790]

I've tried to read the initial pages and the last few pages of this thread trying to figure out how to upgrade the 138.0.0.0.0 Boot Rom of my Mac Pro 5,1 to 140.0.0.0.0, but it's very unclear to me. Perhaps I missed something important, but I don't know what. I'm already running Mojave 10.14.1. Isn't there a standalone ROM updater? If there isn't, how should I proceed? Should I download the full 10.14.1 installer? And then, do what? Reinstall 10.14.1? When, exactly will I be prompted to upgrade the ROM?

EDIT: I've just downloaded the fulll 10.14.1 installer from Apple. I've tried to run it, just in case it offered me to upgrade the ROM, but, curiously enough, it said it couldn't run, because my Mac must have a Metal-compatible card (it already has one) and FileVault shouldn't be in place (it isn't). How do I proceed? I know how to use Pacifist, et cetera. So, where is that updater?

Which OS, which GPU you are running right now? It's hard to help you without knowing your setup.

 

[PeterHolbrook]

Which OS, which GPU you are running right now? It's hard to help you without knowing your setup.

As I said, I am currently running macOS Mojave 10.14.1. My GPU is a Metal-capable AMD Radeon HD 7970 with 3072 MB.

 

[tsialex]

As I said, I am currently running macOS Mojave 10.14.1. My GPU is a Metal-capable AMD Radeon HD 7970 with 3072 MB.

Did you read the first post? Read again about the detection bug.

 

[PeterHolbrook]

Did you read the first post? Read again about the detection bug.

Fine. So, apart from reporting this bug to Apple, is there anything I can actually do to update my Boot ROM?

 

[tsialex]

Fine. So, apart from reporting this bug to Apple, is there anything I can actually do to update my Boot ROM?

You can boot 10.13.6 and run the full 10.14.1 full installer from there, worked for some people.

 

[PeterHolbrook]

You can boot 10.13.6 and run the full 10.14.1 full installer from there, worked for some people.

I no longer have 10.13.6, but I believe I have a zip file of the Mojave GM Installer. The last time I ran said installer, I had High Sierra, and it didn't complain about my Metal card. I wonder if it would complain now. By the way, I've read post 1555 and, provided the GM Installer works on my system, I know how to follow all those instructions. Do you have any pointers that can be tried? For instance, would editing a plist or something like that work if my 7970 GPU is explicitly included among the supported Metal-compatible cards?

 

[tsialex]

I no longer have 10.13.6, but I believe I have a zip file of the Mojave GM Installer. The last time I ran said installer, I had High Sierra, and it didn't complain about my Metal card. I wonder if it would complain now. By the way, I've read post 1555 and, provided the GM Installer works on my system, I know how to follow all those instructions. Do you have any pointers that can be tried? For instance, would editing a plist or something like that work if my 7970 GPU is explicitly included among the supported Metal-compatible cards?

Install 10.13.6 into an empty disk. You can download it here or via homebrew/MAS. GM installer have 138.0.0.0.0, not 140.0.0.0.0.

 

[PeterHolbrook]

Install 10.13.6 into an empty disk. You can download it here or via homebrew/MAS. GM installer have 138.0.0.0.0, not 140.0.0.0.0.

I don't actually have an empty disk. I would need to purchase one just for this. It's crazy that Apple hasn't provided a standalone 140.0.0.0.0 ROM updater and that, apparently, nobody can create one.

EDIT: I've just run the Mojave GM installer (from 10.14.1). It tells me I don't have a Metal card, which is just incredible. Running the same installer in High Sierra worked perfectly. I'll see if I can install High Sierra somewhere, only to do what? Run the 10.14.1 installer so that the Boot ROM can be updated? Would that suffice?