MP 1,1-5,1 MP5,1 - Upgrade to Mojave sorta works, but enters boot loop after install process

[joaopmaia]

I have a MP5,1 desktop which has been on High Sierra for a while, and I've been avoiding the Mojave+ upgrades forever.

I reviewed the sticky master thread here and it seems to me like my computer should accept Mojave just fine, but I cannot figure out what is going wrong with the Mojave upgrade. It seems to be able to go through the install just fine, but then after the whole thing completes, and seems like it is doing the final reboot into the (new) login screen, it enters a boot loop with the regular "there was an error" message.

I can re-install High Sierra from a USB installer thumb drive, but it seems like I'm stuck on High Sierra.

The system has a AMD Radeon HD 7950, which is in the list of supported Metal cards, and the BootROM has been upgraded fully to the current release version 144.0.0.0.0. Those seem to me to be the biggest impediments to upgrading to Mojave.

Can someone provide some tips on what could be wrong here? Let me know if you need any more details about the system itself.

See attached for screenshots of the system specs.

 

[tsialex]

Remove any PCIe cards, do a clean install to another SATA disk, don't do a upgrade, just select another disk with the installer.

Also be sure that you have the most recent Mojave installer, download from here:

How to download and install macOS - Apple Support

Download and install current or previous versions of the Mac operating system on compatible Mac computers.

support.apple.com

 

[joaopmaia]

Remove any PCIe cards, do a clean install to another SATA disk, don't do a upgrade, just select another disk with the installer.

Also be sure that you have the most recent Mojave installer, download from here:

How to download and install macOS - Apple Support

Download and install current or previous versions of the Mac operating system on compatible Mac computers.

support.apple.com

I failed to mention that my set up was of a 512GB AHCI SSD, where I have High Sierra up and running, and then a 1TB SATA SSD where I have (or had) Windows in it.

Per your suggestion I took out the PCIe card with the AHCI SSD, and then left the SATA SSD in there. Created a Mojave installer USB thumb drive, reformatted the SSD and used it as the target of the Mojave install.

Long story short, after going through the process, the computer is now in the same boot loop error state. The installation seemed like it worked, but again in the last reboot of the process, it just errors out and boot loops.

Any ideas as to what I should try now? I didn't try yet, but I'm assuming that I will be able to reset / reinstall High Sierra in there.

 

[tsialex]

Did you tried to enable verbose boot and to take a picture when it fails?

 

[joaopmaia]

I had to search around on how to do that, but it looks like all I have to do is boot up the installer again, open up terminal and run this command?

sudo nvram boot-args=“-v”

Then just reboot and try to go into the regular (newish) Mojave disk?

 

[tsialex]

You don't need to use sudo with the macOS installer Terminal, just nvram boot-args="-v".

 

[joaopmaia]

See attached for two photos, one just prior to the display going black for a few seconds, and then the other one after (I guess) it reboots.

Let me know if that's useful in figuring out what is wrong.

 

[tsialex]

You probably will need to fully erase and recreate the partitions of the disk you want to install, also check with DriveDX if your disks are really healthy, I'm gonna say that is seriously suspected of failure.

 

[joaopmaia]

Hmm, OK, thanks. I might try the install on a separate disk, then. Might be easier for testing purposes just to get one of my old hard drives and try it on it.

So do you know what the deal is with the AHCI SSD that I was trying to use originally? Is it not supported on Mojave or something? I expected it to keep working, as it did previously with High Sierra.

 

[tsialex]

AHCI support didn't change at all. Could be a totally different issue, but some defective disks "work" relatively fine with HFS+ and fail with APFS, I have several SSDs that were once used as part of Fusion drives that don't work with APFS anymore, but "work" with HFS+ and Sierra/HighSierra.

 

[joaopmaia]

@tsialex So I installed DriveDX and generated a report for the SATA SSD that I'm using for the Mojave install. It doesn't look like there's anything wrong with the disk. See attached for the report.

One thing I did not mention a few messages ago is that I re-used the SATA SSD that I was previously using for a Windows install for this Mojave installation attempt. It was formatted with NTFS (or whatever it was), so I did have to fully erase it and format it as APFS prior to trying the install. So your first suggestion of erasing the disk was already taking place.

Could any of this be related to previously trying to use OpenCore Legacy Patcher, or even the custom build from @h9826790 on this thread? I had to add a couple of folders on my EFI partition as part of the custom build installation instructions. Honestly though, the installation problems sort of preceded all of this, so I don't know about how this could be related, but I thought I would mention it.

Just sort of lost for what I should try next. Having the computer stuck on High Sierra is not much fun.

 

[tsialex]

Did you dumped your BootROM and checked if the NVRAM volume is healthy?

 

[joaopmaia]

Yes, I did follow the instructions from either your sticky thread, or @h9826790's thread, and I created a backup of the BootROM with ROMTool.

I wasn't aware that you documented the process of analyzing the dump, but that's very cool that you added so much documentation on that other thread. I reviewed it myself and it seems fine to me? The last "free space" entry inside of "EfiSystemNvDataFvGuid > VSS Store" shows a full size value of "49662". Perhaps that is a bit high since this MP5,1 machine has 8 sticks of RAM in it? I don't know if this is meaningful or not.

It does have a long list of sub-items inside of that "EfiSystemNvDataFvGuid" entry, but I don't know if that means anything. See attached for a screenshot from UEFITool.app.

I would be happy to send you the BootROM file if you would like to review it yourself.

 

[tsialex]

I've sent you a PM, get everything exactly as instructed and I'll investigate what is really going on.