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Nanco

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 3, 2019
6
0
Hi there,

I’ve been running Windows 10 on my 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 flawlessly for a few years now, however I first ran into some problems last year not long after Microsoft made the 1903 build available for download.

Upon updating to that build, everything appeared to be fine at first. I had no BSODs or other issues that had been reported by other users. All of a sudden, I began to experience random system crashes most notably when I was playing games in full screen 1920x1080 resolution. The randomness of these crashes did average about once per day. It could happen during the first hour of playing or perhaps a few hours into a gaming session.

The system itself would hang/freeze with a consistent buzzing sound (no BSODs or actual error codes/messages on screen) leaving the only option to manually turn the Mac off and on again. Upon rebooting, I don’t recall the crash happening twice during a day (even hours after the initial crash occurred).

Its hard for me to tell whether running games was the cause of the problem because this machine is primarily used for playing games anyway. Because the crashes aren’t linked to a single game or event, I could never truly determine a definitive cause.

Needless to say, I rolled back Windows 10 to the previous build (1809) and I experienced no further crashes since doing this.

As I had this issue nearly one year ago, I thought I’d try my chances to see if it had miraculously been fixed through the power of driver updates etc (and because I have a little more time to do some troubleshooting right now). I purchased a brand new SSD and performed a completely fresh installation just in case it might have been a bad left-over driver causing the problem or something. I wanted to keep the “working” installation of Windows 10 in tact just in case I needed that for anything too.

I experienced my first crash within a day of setting everything back up on build 1909 (which I have since learned is the successor to build 1903, the one I initially started having problems with).

From my own experience and what I have found online, the only things I’ve established so far are:

1) Something within older versions of Bootcamp drivers (Brigadier’s recommended version is 041-84868 for my Mac Pro) can cause issues with build 1903+ specifically.

2) The app Macs Fan Control doesn’t like running on Windows 10 systems that have a combination of build 1903+ and that are using Bootcamp version 5 or earlier.

For now, I’ve uninstalled Macs Fan Control to see if this miraculously halts the random crashes and will update this post if it has made any difference to my situation in due course. Just to note, I had no notable problems with using Macs Fan Control during the short time its been running on this installation.

In the meantime, can anyone else help to shed some light on this situation?

Has anyone who owns a 2008 3,1 Mac Pro (or an older model in general) had positive results with running Windows build 1903+? Have you experienced these similar issues in the past and have found a working solution? Assuming the solution is to update Bootcamp to version 6+, how would I go about doing that on an older Mac model? If I recall, I tried in the past and could not proceed due to either the hardware and/or software not being supported.

Thanks for making it this far and sorry for the lengthy post.

Kind Regards,
Matt
 
Hi there,

I have an update on this situation that I want to share along with a conclusion in case anyone else happens to be in the same boat:
  • Macs Fan Control was completely uninstalled for a few hours before the system hung again (no errors/BSOD/notable error log entries within Windows). The problem I'm experiencing is definitely nothing to do with Macs Fan Control despite what a lot of online sources claim.
  • I tried swapping out MacHALDriver.sys for the newest one obtained via the iMacPro/Brigadier method. This only got rid of the Macs Fan Control incompatibility warning message but did not prevent the system from hanging.
  • I actually managed to install Bootcamp version 6 through some unorthodox means (truth be told, I can’t actually remember how exactly I managed to achieve this but it involved messing around in command line and swapping out drivers manually for ones specific to the system). This actually caused more problems than it was worth so I don't recommend anyone else trying this unless they have a very good reason for wanting to.
The overall conclusion I’ve reached is, unless I’m missing something completely obvious as to how and why the system crashes in the first place, it is ultimately not worth trying to get newer builds of Windows 10 to run on older Mac hardware. There is clearly some kind of unknown incompatibility here with builds 1903+ that I’m unable to fathom out using a combination of my own knowledge and the information I’ve obtained by reading various posts and guides online.

This Mac Pro was an old salvaged system project that has seen seldom issues throughout its lifespan. Considering the system runs completely fine under build 1809, it may be worth just sticking with this until it reaches its end of life and then exploring alternative options moving forward.

It would still be interesting to learn if anyone else with this same problem has managed to find out what causes it and if there is a fix.

Kind Regards,
Matt
 
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