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Windows 10 experiences on cMP

m4v3r1ck said:
Thanks!

Reverted back with a Winclone Windows 8.1 Pro x64 backup! I'm (for now) done with these upgrade issues.

It's not the applications that are crashing, but that Windows 10 upgrade KILLED most (90%) of my applications.

Fed up to trial-and-error this! The TP worked perfectly in a VM, but the real thing is a nightmare for my setup.

Later I'll try the "remove all hardware" method (exept PCI cards) like SSD's and move my Windows SSD to bay #1-4.

Cheers
Click to expand...

My issue is easily fixable with an update. Without Steam running I am not having any issues. My next computer will be a PC so I might as well get used to spending more time in Windows because after the cMP I don't know how I could purchase a desktop Mac again without PCIE slots and drive bays. Unless Apple creates a tower again or officially lets OS X run on any Intel PC. I'm not doing hackintosh.
 
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SoyCapitanSoyCapitan said:
My issue is easily fixable with an update. Without Steam running I am not having any issues. My next computer will be a PC so I might as well get used to spending more time in Windows because after the cMP I don't know how I could purchase a desktop Mac again without PCIE slots and drive bays. Unless Apple creates a tower again or officially lets OS X run on any Intel PC. I'm not doing hackintosh.
Click to expand...

Like Microsoft & Steam are NOT aware of each other existance? Strange...

Good luck with your next PC, I'll hold on to my cMP 5.1 as long as possible!

Cheers
 
SoyCapitanSoyCapitan said:
My issue is easily fixable with an update. Without Steam running I am not having any issues. My next computer will be a PC so I might as well get used to spending more time in Windows because after the cMP I don't know how I could purchase a desktop Mac again without PCIE slots and drive bays. Unless Apple creates a tower again or officially lets OS X run on any Intel PC. I'm not doing hackintosh.
Click to expand...

I feel much the same way. I have so much invested in internal and external drives, internal cards, etc., even moving to a 2013 Mac Pro would be an expensive pain in the butt.
Luckily my cMac Pro is in great shape, but for how long, I don't know.
I sure hope the 2013 model isn't the end of the Mac Pro line design-wise. No hackintosh for me either.
 
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Clean installed Windows 10 in EFI mode. It boot to the desktop after install. But it won't boot to desktop subsequently. It keeps going into an endless reboot cycle. I don't have anything installed except the GT120 and SSD in BAY 1.

Edit : dead EFI install. Have to recover from Winclone.
 
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howiest said:
I sure hope the 2013 model isn't the end of the Mac Pro line design-wise. No hackintosh for me either.
Click to expand...

If you like slots and bays as I do, then I wouldn't hold any hope of a future MP redesign including those. Apple's design trends are quite the opposite.
 
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Were you using Option-boot or via Startup Disk?

Startup Disk didn't work for me; Mac always tried to use BIOS emulation mode and would get the "No boot device found" error. I'm pretty sure I need to redo the 'bless' command to get that to work, but am not sure how.

BootChamp 1.7 beta in this thread boots without needing the option key method (much faster)
https://github.com/kainjow/BootChamp/issues/17

To switch back to OS X you'll need to option-boot - developer is aware of this issue.
 
ActionableMango said:
If you like slots and bays as I do, then I wouldn't hold any hope of a future MP redesign including those. Apple's design trends are quite the opposite.
Click to expand...

I know, it's just hard to imagine switching solely to Windows and associated hardware after being a Mac guy since 1990. I guess I'll have some decisions to make eventually, like buying an iMac, and embracing Thunderbolt. ~sigh~
 
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SoyCapitanSoyCapitan said:
Clean installed Windows 10 in EFI mode. It boot to the desktop after install. But it won't boot to desktop subsequently. It keeps going into an endless reboot cycle. I don't have anything installed except the GT120 and SSD in BAY 1.

Edit : dead EFI install. Have to recover from Winclone.
Click to expand...

I really dont understand why you are having so many problems here.
My 2012 5,1 had win81pro EFI installed, I did a from-dvd upgrade to win10pro EFI, no problems at all, my apps all worked, and the only thing I needed to reload was bootcamp drivers and nvidia driver for the 680. Then, 2 days ago, I did a clean install since the upgrade worked, and I wanted a best possible install. I removed the other 3 hard disks, and disconnected the ssd, leaving only one 2tb hard disk in bay 1. Put in the win10pro dvd, it defaulted to EFI install, loaded drivers, loaded bootcamp, everything is fine. I have had ZERO problems. I really wonder why yours is choking on it.

Drives shouldnt matter, the only difference I can think of is your gt120 vid card. I'm using an evga 680 mac. My ssd is in bay 0, the lower dvd drive bay.
 
Surrat said:
I really dont understand why you are having so many problems here.
My 2012 5,1 had win81pro EFI installed, I did a from-dvd upgrade to win10pro EFI, no problems at all, my apps all worked, and the only thing I needed to reload was bootcamp drivers and nvidia driver for the 680. Then, 2 days ago, I did a clean install since the upgrade worked, and I wanted a best possible install. I removed the other 3 hard disks, and disconnected the ssd, leaving only one 2tb hard disk in bay 1. Put in the win10pro dvd, it defaulted to EFI install, loaded drivers, loaded bootcamp, everything is fine. I have had ZERO problems. I really wonder why yours is choking on it.

Drives shouldnt matter, the only difference I can think of is your gt120 vid card. I'm using an evga 680 mac. My ssd is in bay 0, the lower dvd drive bay.
Click to expand...

Not 'so many problems'

The USB 3.1 card is so new I don't expect a stable driver especially on a non standard X58 motherboard.

Steam is definitely the cause of my hard crashes. It just needs an update.

I hear several types of experiences with EFI installs. One says works like normal, another says you have to use Bootchamp, others can't get it to work well. I have fallen into the last camp.

Any other bugs I have experienced are classical PC bugs that have been around for years or new bugs because the OS is at least a year away from being mature as 8.1 or 7.

There might even be undiscovered problems with dual cMP Win 10 systems that I'm the first to experience.
 
For mine I completely wiped (using diskutil 'clean' command) the Windows C drive, yanked all Mac drives out during the install, installed off Microsoft's USB tool using option-hold EFI Boot, let the Windows installer handle the formatting and partitions. Boots up shockingly fast with Bootchamp 1.7, I hear the Mac chime and before I know it, staring at the Windows login screen. Way faster than BIOS. It also works perfectly with VMWare Fusion.
 
Demigod Mac said:
For mine I completely wiped (using diskutil 'clean' command) the Windows C drive, yanked all Mac drives out during the install, installed off Microsoft's USB tool using option-hold EFI Boot, let the Windows installer handle the formatting and partitions. Boots up shockingly fast with Bootchamp 1.7, I hear the Mac chime and before I know it, staring at the Windows login screen. Way faster than BIOS. It also works perfectly with VMWare Fusion.
Click to expand...

And if you don't use Bootchamp it doesn't boot?
 
Startup Disk control panel method doesn't work - it incorrectly assumes it's a traditional BIOS emulation install.

Bootchamp 1.7 and holding Option at startup work, Bootchamp being significantly faster because you don't have to wait for the list of disks to populate.
 
Demigod Mac said:
Startup Disk control panel method doesn't work - it incorrectly assumes it's a traditional BIOS emulation install.

Bootchamp 1.7 and holding Option at startup work, Bootchamp being significantly faster because you don't have to wait for the list of disks to populate.
Click to expand...

Option didn't give me a good result, failed to find boot device message. Same error message I got when I converted a Legacy install to EFI with Winclone.

As explained, it showed me a desktop after installation but after that when I boot Windows myself for the firsts time it went into an endless reboot cycle failing to reach the desktop.

Anyway, what I could tell is that yes Windows would initiate to load faster after the chime with the EFI but it wasn't noticeably faster to boot after that because EFI has no effect on boot times after the OS starts to kid into memory.

Anyway I restored my Winclone back up and await all the software updates and patches. Until then I'll mostly make use of El Capitan for my pro apps (works fine), Win10 for a bit of gaming, and Yosemite for administrating the computer until El Cap is released.
 
Demigod Mac said:
Startup Disk control panel method doesn't work - it incorrectly assumes it's a traditional BIOS emulation install.

Bootchamp 1.7 and holding Option at startup work, Bootchamp being significantly faster because you don't have to wait for the list of disks to populate.
Click to expand...

This is a really interesting problem for me because I've installed Windows 8.1 EFI twice now, clean installations to wiped SSDs both times. The first installation was gravy and all boot/reboot methods worked great. Verified EFI installation.

The second I did the same using the same process from the same install media on the same computer, only just a larger/different SSD. Verified EFI installation and everything is working fine, except for the boot methods you mentioned. If there is something I did differently, I don't know what it is.

Basically, in the chart below from Rod's Books, the Mac is going left at the first diamond instead of right. Then it doesn't find a boot loader so it fails. But for some reason if you/I hold down ALT/OPTION then the Mac does figure out that the Windows drive is an EFI boot and boots it correctly.

multiboot-path.png


From http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/csm-good-bad-ugly.html

He explains it pretty well in the first bullet point after the figure.
 
ActionableMango said:
This is a really interesting problem for me because I've installed Windows 8.1 EFI twice now, clean installations to wiped SSDs both times. The first installation was gravy and all boot/reboot methods worked great. Verified EFI installation.

The second I did the same using the same process from the same install media on the same computer, only just a larger/different SSD. Verified EFI installation and everything is working fine, except for the boot methods you mentioned. If there is something I did differently, I don't know what it is.

Basically, in the chart below from Rod's Books, the Mac is going left at the first diamond instead of right. Then it doesn't find a boot loader so it fails. But for some reason if you/I hold down ALT/OPTION then the Mac does figure out that the Windows drive is an EFI boot and boots it correctly.

multiboot-path.png


From http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/csm-good-bad-ugly.html

He explains it pretty well in the first bullet point after the figure.
Click to expand...

It looks like boot behaviour follows the map randomly so sometimes it goes right and sometimes wrong. Maybe Mac EFI is confusing to Windows especially less than version 2.0 which isn't supposed to work anyway
 
SoyCapitanSoyCapitan said:
It looks like boot behaviour follows the map randomly so sometimes it goes right and sometimes wrong. Maybe Mac EFI is confusing to Windows especially less than version 2.0 which isn't supposed to work anyway
Click to expand...

Dont know where this fits in, but maybe it will help:

On my 5,1, with win81 or win10, if I use the yosemite startup panel to set it to boot windows, the computer will boot to a black screen saying no boot device. This was covered as being caused by the fact that its an EFI install and the startup setting expects bios emulation.

The way I fix it, is clear the pram. When I do that, the mac will always default to booting windows EFI. I use the option key boot to select OSX if I want to run yosemite.

When you prepare your hard disk for windows, boot with the win10 media, select repair the computer, then go into the command prompt. You then used the command line DISKPART utility to CLEAN the disk? Thats the only way I know of to totally wipe a disk, it even deletes the EFI and hidden system partitions. After that, during install, partition it how you like, the installer will tell you it might create extra partitions, then let it go.

Not trying to be redundant, just confused as to the cause of the errors your getting since I didnt get them at all when I used win81 or win10.

(Note for others) Remember not to do the CLEAN disk install until after you have first installed win10 as an upgrade. Once it has registered itself with successful activation, then you can wipe the disk and build a clean install.
 
Surrat said:
(Note for others) Remember not to do the CLEAN disk install until after you have first installed win10 as an upgrade. Once it has registered itself with successful activation, then you can wipe the disk and build a clean install.
Click to expand...

I was wondering about this exact thing. (1) How do I know for certain when it has been activated. (2) When I do a clean install from the install media, as opposed to an upgrade, won't it ask me for a product key?
 
I think it's because the Startup Disk panel assumes the Windows folder is BIOS and attempts that instead of correctly hitting the EFI partition. Also, Bootchamp 1.6 had the "No Boot Device" issue when the EFI partition wasn't in the expected place, but 1.7 searches all partitions for a bootable volume.

I'm reasonably certain all this could be fixed with the 'bless' command - unbless the Windows drive and bless the EFI drive. I keep reading conflicting accounts on which command switches to use, however.
 
SoyCapitanSoyCapitan said:
Attempt to find a Windows disk cloning utility as good as SuperDuper or CCC is a disaster so far. I tested Acronis and Macrium. Both failed to create volumes on the destination drive. The other apps available are buggy, don't work, fail to clone, fail to copy partitions or are abandonware. Some of them look like they might contain malware or adware. Reviews for them on PcWorld look like spammy advertorials with no real test by the reviewer.
Click to expand...
Try WinClone. It copies and moves Windows partitions under OS X. Allows shrinking and expanding, copying to image etc. Totally essential for Boot Camp users.
 
ActionableMango said:
I was wondering about this exact thing. (1) How do I know for certain when it has been activated. (2) When I do a clean install from the install media, as opposed to an upgrade, won't it ask me for a product key?
Click to expand...

It will say "Windows is activated" and the product key will end in H8Q99 (Home) or 3V66T (Pro).
After that your hardware ID is registered on Microsoft's activation servers and will automatically reactivate without a key on the clean install (hit Skip every time it asks for a key and it will activate when you login for the first time)

This won't work so well if you use a virtual machine + Bootcamp, however.
 
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