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OSX High Sierra update from 5,1 Mac Pro w Sierra

MPortmann

Active Member
I can’t for the life of me update my Mac Pro 5,1 to High Sierra, let alone Mojave. I’ve tried the App Store High Sierra update 8x, doesn’t work for me. Made bootable USB drive and tried that, still nothing. Should mention I upgraded my video card last year to an AMD Radeon 7000 series w metal capability. I’ve read that the High Sierra works if you have the original 5,1 video card. I don’t unfortunately.

Anyone have success with this OS X update w similar computer specs? Appreciate any tech info to help with this. Thanks
 
Worked for me but for the actual high Sierra upgrade there is a firmware upgrade that is built into the high Sierra updater and for that you need to have an originally supported video card for the boot screen step to do the firmware. You do not need metal and probably if your card has metal it is not an originally supported vid card with boot screen. You should always keep one of those around in your closet in case you ever need to access the boot rom such as this.

For Mojave Apple made the updater smarter so that it will update the firmware again without your intervention so it will work with the metal card installed and that is required for Mojave too.
 
Yep. Without old video card seems like I’m stuck. Can’t get to Mojave without the High Sierra update step
 
Find someone to borrow from I guess? I don't think there is a way around that.

Dewdman, if you put an original video card (like an Nvidia GT120) in a machine with Mojave firmware, will it still work?

And can you boot from older macOS versions if you have a Metal card (RX560) and Mojave?
 
I believe you can use metal cards back to Sierra but I could be wrong, it might go back further. I’m not familiar with the nvidia card so you’ll have to research that but if it has the Mac boot rom or if it was sold by apple originally in the 5,1 then yea that will work for high Sierra. You will need metal card for mojave
 
Oh, the Nvidia card was the Apple stock one in the 2009 4,1 - which is how my machine started out. Now it's a 12-core 3.46GHz 5,1, with the exact MSI RX560 that Apple specifies, and I'm running Mojave.

My question is really whether I should have kept the original video card (I'm not sure why I'd need it, but who knows). At one point the machine ran whatever OS X was around ten years ago, of course, but I don't know whether firmware updates have stopped that.
 
Since you’re already on Mojave I wouldn’t worry about it. I am keeping mine just in case but we’re unlikely to need it again at this point
 
Does all this mean that if I go up to Mojave on my 2012 - 5.1 - 12 core with the original video card, I’m good? Upgrading from osx 8.5 (yes - ancient.)
 
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