MP 1,1-5,1 Manually Configured OpenCore on the Mac Pro

[cdf]

my drive currently is formatted as APFS and has one container for mojave, will i need a second drive installed with catalina?

It's not necessary. The only requirement is an EFI partition; you can just use the one from your Mojave disk.

 

[pierrox]

So I am new to using the OpenCore, I have a MacPro early 2009 that i have firmware flashed to be a 5,1 I have installed a non apple graphics card the XFX RX580 8gig card, (same as the Radeon RX580)
and was looking for help on getting the boot screen back.

If you're just looking for Boot Picker (and HW acceleration too), you're better off using the info in this thread - you'll find a ready for use package which does wonder thanks to @h9826790

 

[Sharky II]

Sorry for the ignorant post - but is OpenCore something that requires updating at all?

I installed it a few months ago and all seems to be running well, but I'm struggling to keep up with this thread and information!

Thanks,

Ed

 

[6DecadesLater]

So I am new to using the OpenCore, I have a MacPro early 2009 that i have firmware flashed to be a 5,1 I have installed a non apple graphics card the XFX RX580 8gig card, (same as the Radeon RX580)
and was looking for help on getting the boot screen back.

Im a little confused on the install process of the OpenCore and getting things to work. I also will be repeating the process on a late 2008 that i will be upgrading to mojave as well after the whole firmware process is done but will end up keeping the non-metal card if it works and use dosdude1 patcher to keep things going.

if I'm not going to upgrade into catalina will i follow the instructions on page 1 and just put everything into disk a?

my drive currently is formatted as APFS and has one container for mojave, will i need a second drive installed with catalina?

it does confuse me, but once explained i am able to follow the instructions,

Im just confused as to if i need to have 2 drives one with catalina and one with mojave on disk B?

thanks in advance for any help or pointing me to where it may very well be in the forum.

As cdf indicated you do not need catalina. I have a 5,1 (mid 2010 not a flashed 4,1). I put in the XFX RX580 as I wanted support for three monitors. With this metal enabled gpu I was able to upgrade to Mojave which gave me the firmware update. I followed the guide more or less but used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my Mojave SATA boot drive to a PCIe NVMe adapter with a 1TB SSD. I then followed the guide to install catalina on the SSD. When booting into the recovery mode, I found I had to disconnect 2 monitors to get the recovery window on the one still plugged in. One thing I had to do to get the graphics bootpicker was to set the small switch to the non-gaming mode (push to the left). Small switch is visible on the upside of the installed card (inside not on faceplate) under the cooling coil There is a post somewhere about this but couldn't find it readily - my thanks to that poster, sorry I couldn't point to it). It took many NVRAM clears in the process. In the end, I also pulled the original Mojave SATA boot to get it to boot cleanly to the catalina ssd. Then shutdown, reinstalled original Mojave disk and after a SMC/NVRAM reset bootpicker came up with default to catalina, the Mojave and Win10 I installed via the guide. The reason I am chronicling this is that setting the switch on the RX580 was essential. Also, I am not sure I could have gotten over the needed NVRAM reset issue with each reboot without pulling the original boot drive (Mojave). Also, wanted to make a plug for the SSD upgrade whether you stay with Mojave or do Catalina. The performance difference was HUGE. I have dual 6 cores which were clearly IO bound on the old drive. I am very very happy with the upgraded 5,1. No issues with Catalina and it is very fast. The upgraded graphics card made a noticeable difference too before adding the ssd. Good luck with the upgrade - well worth the time spent.

Edit: One thing to note. I had upgraded my bluetooth to BCM94360CD a while back while running Sierra. With that I had no issues with BT/Wifi including support for BT mouse. Without that upgrade I would have had some problems.

Edit: I forgot to mention that I tried the hardware acceleration but that gave me issues - wouldn't boot properly. I backed that out and all is good. Perhaps I did something incorrectly but haven't gone back to try again. I doubt I will see much speed up (12 core/48Gb RAM) so have just gone without.

Edit: Redid hw acceleration and did night shift and made new SSD internal. All working now. Must have screwed up teh config.plist the first time.

BIG thanks to opencore team and others on this thread for leading the way.

 

[Enricote]

Hi! I have Opencore 0.5.9 installed and I use OpenCanopy for Bootpicker following the excellent wiki guide here. Thanks everyone for this great Job.

My default system to use is Catalina. I have Mojave and Windows 10, which I rarely use.

I wonder if it would be possible to have the OC BootPicker just as an option to choose in order to save time starting the default system. I mean, something like the original Apple UEFI Startup manager (with the Option key).

Maybe it is a silly question! Sorry!

Thanks again

 

[h9826790]

Hi! I have Opencore 0.5.9 installed and I use OpenCanopy for Bootpicker following the excellent wiki guide here. Thanks everyone for this great Job.

My default system to use is Catalina. I have Mojave and Windows 10, which I rarely use.

I wonder if it would be possible to have the OC BootPicker just as an option to choose in order to save time starting the default system. I mean, something like the original Apple UEFI Startup manager (with the Option key).

Maybe it is a silly question! Sorry!

Thanks again

<key>ShowPicker</key>
<false/>

Then hold "Esc" to boot when you want the boot picker.

 

[pierrox]

I have a spare drive with Windows 10 on it. When I need Windows, pretty rare, I just remove all other drives and put this 3.5" drive which was created via BootCamp.
Except that now that I have OpenCore (on a USB stick), Boot Picker won't see it.
What are my options? How do I reinstall a Windows version that works with OC?

 

[h9826790]

I have a spare drive with Windows 10 on it. When I need Windows, pretty rare, I just remove all other drives and put this 3.5" drive which was created via BootCamp.
Except that now that I have OpenCore (on a USB stick), Boot Picker won't see it.
What are my options? How do I reinstall a Windows version that works with OC?

How to: Boot Camp without a Boot Screen

Yes Intro : For install Win10 on cMP you need DVD bootable with Win10 and press "c" on cMP boot to start on DVD, and install Win10. Now I suppose as me you can boot on Win10 from your cMP, if not please remove all your other boot drive (Mac OS, ...) to be sure to boot only first on Win10. 1)...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[cdf]

I would recommend that users revisit the wiki once in a while:

I wonder if it would be possible to have the OC BootPicker just as an option to choose in order to save time starting the default system. I mean, something like the original Apple UEFI Startup manager (with the Option key).

See "Post-Install" in the wiki.

How do I reinstall a Windows version that works with OC?

See "Installing Windows 10" in the wiki.

 

[pierrox]

Thanks guys!
Read the Wiki and @h9826790 's advice, so it doesn't look like I can save my current Windows 10 install, I have to start from scratch? Can't just modify it and make it OC compatible. Oh well, that'll be something for the next rainy weekend.

 

[Macschrauber]

You can chainload refind from OpenCore and start your non-uefi Windows Installation from refit

OpenCore on the Mac Pro

So I used the attached refind and this setting: Misc BlessOverride /EFI/refind/refind_GOPx64.efi And I got EFI option in OC, which when selected, booted to GRUB. All visible on the display. Now testing this: Misc BlessOverride...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[pierrox]

You can chainload refind from OpenCore and start your non-uefi Windows Installation from refit

OpenCore on the Mac Pro

So I used the attached refind and this setting: Misc BlessOverride /EFI/refind/refind_GOPx64.efi And I got EFI option in OC, which when selected, booted to GRUB. All visible on the display. Now testing this: Misc BlessOverride...

forums.macrumors.com

Thanks for pointing to this, that's an interesting way to do it. Might start with that as it's a simple first step before a full Windows reinstall.

 

[jpetersohn]

There is a patch in OpenCore Sample.plist, which kills RTC wake completely.

Worked perfectly! Thank you!

 

[DigitaLife]

Hi all, today I replaced the Sapphire RX580 with the Radeon VII on my cMP 5.1.
I have two monitors connected: Apple Cinema HD 30 "and Apple LED Cinema Display 27". Obviously the Cinema HD 30 "I had to connect it with a StarTech DisplayPort to DVI Dual Link Active Adapter.
When I start the Mac Pro without OC, with Mojave, everything is OK! But then when I reinstalled OC 0.5.9 strange things happen:
1) when the OpenCanopy boot picker appears the keyboard and mouse no longer work and therefore I am forced to start with the default drive (Catalina) without being able to choose;
2) once the boot starts, I don't see the Apple logo but only the progress bar (on the LED Cinema Display 27 ");
3) finally, when the login screen appears, on the Cinema HD 30", the resolution is the minimum available and the 27" Cinema Display LED monitor is no longer visible (the system cannot detect it).
Maybe I need to change some things into the config.plist?
Can someone help me?
Thanks in advance!

 

[kroneo]

The AirPortBrcm4331.kext is a plugin for the bundled IO80211Family.kext. It is has a linked dependancy on this kext and that may be where the problem lies. I would suggest copying into the plugins of the Catalina IO80211Family.kext and then carry out the permissions etc. I think this is what the dosdude1 patch does and obviously the legacy wifi can work once patched as proven by the Catalina Patcher thread. As you have found, trying to run AirPortBrcm4331.kext directly from L/E or with OC has not worked. If you successfully patch then you will likely have to repeat this during an update as there may be a fair chance that the patch is overwritten.
If the patched Catalina IO80211Family.kext does bring back your wifi then it would be interesting to see whether OC could insert this kext and therefore solve the problem of the fix being overwritten in future. Good luck
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@cdf. If you have time can you explain why the AppleMCEReporterDisabler.kext (page 1) does not have an Executable path set. I have looked in the manual and it does not really help me in understanding when the Executable path has to be set or not. Failsafe being empty.

My experience: the easiest way is probably to use dosdudes Post Patcher Tool and install the Legacy Wifi Patch + the SIP Disable Patch. You need both, because otherwise the AirPortBrcm4331.kext will not work.

 

[TECK]

Related to Windows freezing issues some of us experience, with save mode enabled, I can boot fine. I see @cdf posted a fix for disk with /compact enabled, what is the fix for the VirtualBox install?

 

[Arven]

Hi, this is my first time to post here, I hope everybody is doing well and healthy. I successfully installed Catalina on my cMP 2009 using the guide in this post until Part I only. I haven't performed yet the Part II Advanced Configuration. I am living here in Japan so I am using the Japanese magic keyboard, the toggle key for switching English/Japanese input works fine, Japanese input properly showed on the menu bar. When I toggle from English to Japanese, always English letters come out. I tried to google for similar problem but I found nothing. Is there anybody has the same problem with keyboard inputs on Catalina installed by OpenCore? I will very much appreciate if somebody can help me.

 

[Jiggly Billy]

Oof. I kinda screwed myself, wondering if anyone has any advice.

My OS was 10.15.4 & running the old OC 0.5.6 for months now. I decided to upgrade them both. First I updated to OC 0.5.9, and reused my pre-existing config.plist file. Copied them over to my EFI volume, worked perfectly. OC was updated and all was happy. Now, I made sure that everything was setup so I could update Catalina to 10.15.5. All was set to go, I clicked reboot, the little progress bar with the Apple logo went across the screen, it rebooted....then shut down. Now I go to boot, it won't even hit the OC boot loader.

So everyone, how badly did I mess it up? I'm off to get an NVMe to USB adapter so I can use my Hackintosh Lenovo X270 to get to the drive if need be.


EDIT: Unscrewed myself. Used the sample config.plist file and reset NVRAM 3 times. Booted right back up!

 

[VillasManzanill]

My experience: the easiest way is probably to use dosdudes Post Patcher Tool and install the Legacy Wifi Patch + the SIP Disable Patch. You need both, because otherwise the AirPortBrcm4331.kext will not work.

i tried the dosdude patcher but i only did the Legacy wifi patch.
if i do the other patch, is it gonna mess up somethign on my perfect opencore .0.59 ? thanks so much

 

[Jiggly Billy]

Ok new problem. I put my Windows 10 SSD back in, and now it's bypassing OC completely. I tried re-blessing the EFI partition, but with the W10 SSD in it just goes straight into that. Any ideas? This is the exact same drive I was using with OC 0.5.6 & the same W10 installation

 

[cdf]

Ok new problem. I put my Windows 10 SSD back in, and now it's bypassing OC completely. I tried re-blessing the EFI partition, but with the W10 SSD in it just goes straight into that. Any ideas? This is the exact same drive I was using with OC 0.5.6 & the same W10 installation

Version 0.5.9 handles Windows differently. You should remove the Microsoft bootx64.efi file from the Windows EFI system partition. Make sure not to delete the OC bootx64.efi file, though. You can always check by opening the file with TextEdit; the OC file contains the string "Acidanthera."

 

[eksu]

Having trouble running the Big Sur updated from on-site Catalina with VMM flag but will try to install from USB or I will disable the iMac / whatever green kept stuff and see if that makes a difference.

 

[h9826790]

Having trouble running the Big Sur updated from on-site Catalina with VMM flag but will try to install from USB or I will disable the iMac / whatever green kept stuff and see if that makes a difference.

It seems OK at this moment. Let's see if I can install that properly.

 

[h9826790]

One step further. In order to let the installer run properly, we need to completely spoof the SMBIOS.

 

[startergo]

One step further. In order to let the installer run properly, we need to completely spoof the SMBIOS.
View attachment 926128

Make sure you exit from all Apple services to prevent account block.