Reinstalling Mac OS

[yolosnail]

I recently acquired a 2009 8 Core Mac Pro for cheap, but the previous owner took out the hard drives, which is understandable as it came out of a recording studio. However, I need to reinstall Mac OS on a new SSD that I just bought and that is quite the pain if I don't have another Mac! 

I have family that have MacBooks, but they are all running a newer OS than the 2009 Mac Pro can support.

I tried making a bootable USB drive using Transmac, it is recognised by the computer and starts to boot from it, but after the loading bar I just get a prohibited sign.

 

I know this isn't the best place to ask as most of you despise Macs (and so do I tbh, but I couldn't resist buying it for the price), but is there any other way I can get Mac OS installed or do I have to resort to buying a sketchy bootable USB drive off ebay?

 

The Mac works fine, I have Ubuntu running on it at the minute, just one of the CPUs gets up to 90c while the other barely goes above 60c

[DrMacintosh]

I can provide you with a copy of OSX Moutain Lion which I have legitimately acquired from my 2011 iMac.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0Bzg300EpviIoV2hnalE4cU5Dcjg?usp=sharing

 

Make an installer with that and you should be good to go! You can update to whatever you want from the App store after you install Mountain Lion. 

[yolosnail]

2 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

I can provide you with a copy of OSX Moutain Lion which I have legitimately acquired from my 2011 iMac.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0Bzg300EpviIoV2hnalE4cU5Dcjg?usp=sharing

 

Make an installer with that and you should be good to go! 

I'll give that a download and hopefully it will work! If my internet decides to behave itself, I might be able to have a working Mac today!

Thanks very much!

[Sousuke]

You have a 4,1 MacPro with 2 CPU Sockets.

 

You have the beginning of the best system that Apple may have ever built! 

 

You can do a firmware upgrade to give it the EUFI of a 5,1 and then you can pop in 2 6 Core Xeon's in there! 

 

With your thermal issues probs just needs a thermal paste replacement. 

[yolosnail]

1 minute ago, Sousuke said:

You have a 4,1 MacPro with 2 CPU Sockets.

 

You have the beginning of the best system that Apple may have ever built! 

 

You can do a firmware upgrade to give it the EUFI of a 5,1 and then you can pop in 2 6 Core Xeon's in there! 

 

With your thermal issues probs just needs a thermal paste replacement. 

That's EXACTLY what I'm going to do eventually. I'm getting some thermal paste Primed to arrive tomorrow to sort the thermals out, and when I can get a good deal on the 6 cores, I'll put them in, but I don't really need them at the extra power at the minute. I've got 16GB of ram on it's way soon

Would you believe I only paid £30 for the system?

[Sousuke]

21 minutes ago, yolosnail said:

I'll give that a download and hopefully it will work! If my internet decides to behave itself, I might be able to have a working Mac today!

Thanks very much!

Also with you being based in the UK if that doesn't work I'll burn a copy myself and post it to you. 

[Sousuke]

1 minute ago, yolosnail said:

That's EXACTLY what I'm going to do eventually. I'm getting some thermal paste Primed to arrive tomorrow to sort the thermals out, and when I can get a good deal on the 6 cores, I'll put them in, but I don't really need them at the extra power at the minute. I've got 16GB of ram on it's way soon

Would you believe I only paid £30 for the system?

£30 ... Jesus thats a great deal, I was a fool and bought a 3,1 6 years ago for £400  then this iMac for £1.5k 

[yolosnail]

1 minute ago, Sousuke said:

£30 ... Jesus thats a great deal, I was a fool and bought a 3,1 6 years ago for £400  then this iMac for £1.5k 

I originally wanted just the case as I think it's the best looking case ever designed, so I found a faulty one that kept locking up and got it for £30.  When I got it home, I opened it up and it was just full of dust, so I cleaned it all out, and it's been running a 16 thread stress test for a day now with no problems, except from the 90c but that's easily fixed.

They thought they took out all of the RAM but they didn't realise that there was more behind the heatsink so I took one of the sticks from that bank and put it in the second bank and have been running it with 2GB of RAM, which is a nightmare but for testing it was fine.

 

Clearly the previous owner was a typical Apple user and didn't know that computers have to run cool to work

 

8 minutes ago, Sousuke said:

Also with you being based in the UK if that doesn't work I'll burn a copy myself and post it to you. 

That is very kind of you, I hope this works as it's literally consuming me at the minute 

[yolosnail]

15 minutes ago, Sousuke said:

You can do a firmware upgrade to give it the EUFI of a 5,1 and then you can pop in 2 6 Core Xeon's in there! 

 

Doesn't 5,1 also let you upgrade to the latest Mac OS, whereas 4,1 is stuck on El Capitan?

[Sousuke]

2 minutes ago, yolosnail said:

I originally wanted just the case as I think it's the best looking case ever designed, so I found a faulty one that kept locking up and got it for £30.  When I got it home, I opened it up and it was just full of dust, so I cleaned it all out, and it's been running a 16 thread stress test for a day now with no problems, except from the 90c but that's easily fixed.

They thought they took out all of the RAM but they didn't realise that there was more behind the heatsink so I took one of the sticks from that bank and put it in the second bank and have been running it with 2GB of RAM, which is a nightmare but for testing it was fine.

 

Clearly the previous owner was a typical Apple user and didn't know that computers have to run cool to work

 

That is very kind of you, I hope this works as it's literally consuming me at the minute 

 

Pretty much, Every machine I get I change the thermal paste and clean it out as some apple machines manage to overheat to death (Notebooks especially).

12 minutes ago, yolosnail said:

Doesn't 5,1 also let you upgrade to the latest Mac OS, whereas 4,1 is stuck on El Capitan?

Will let you get up to High Sierra to my knowledge! 

[yolosnail]

4 minutes ago, Sousuke said:

some apple machines manage to overheat to death (Notebooks especially).

I'm pretty sure Apple design their notebooks to overheat, so you will take it to the 'Genius' bar for them to tell you that you need to spend nearly the full price of the computer to fix it.

 

6 minutes ago, Sousuke said:

Will let you get up to High Sierra to my knowledge! 

I think I will get Mojave as well as long as I get a Metal capable GPU. I think I'm going to get an RX480 as there are a couple of them going 'cheap' in my area. I'm 100% sure they've been used for mining, but that doesn't bother me too much

[Ashleyyyy]

4 hours ago, yolosnail said:

I'm pretty sure Apple design their notebooks to overheat, so you will take it to the 'Genius' bar for them to tell you that you need to spend nearly the full price of the computer to fix it.

yup. my MacBook will get crazy hot unless i use fan control software.. 

 

5 hours ago, Sousuke said:

 

Pretty much, Every machine I get I change the thermal paste and clean it out as some apple machines manage to overheat to death (Notebooks especially).

that has been a big fear of mine. i've set my own thermal limit of 65 degrees to keep it cool, because the gpu in my MacBook is known to fail.. 

[Sousuke]

10 hours ago, firelighter487 said:

yup. my MacBook will get crazy hot unless i use fan control software.. 

 

that has been a big fear of mine. i've set my own thermal limit of 65 degrees to keep it cool, because the gpu in my MacBook is known to fail.. 

I've been a little lax on my 2010 MacBook Pro and only just replaced the thermal paste and cleaned everything out and its idling 39*c which is good  Got the fan controls all setup to keep the system cool! Used Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste!

 

Got to admit this 2010 machine is awesome, its a 1st Gen i5 but it still works, may get a new MacBook Pro in the next year or so now they've fixed the keyboard. 

 

[Ashleyyyy]

5 hours ago, Sousuke said:

I've been a little lax on my 2010 MacBook Pro and only just replaced the thermal paste and cleaned everything out and its idling 39*c which is good  Got the fan controls all setup to keep the system cool! Used Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste!

 

Got to admit this 2010 machine is awesome, its a 1st Gen i5 but it still works, may get a new MacBook Pro in the next year or so now they've fixed the keyboard. 

 

how do those early i5's perform? do you get a lot of lag around macOS with one of those cpu's? I'm interested in getting a 2011 13" MacBook Pro because my 15" is a massive machine and I want something lighter to carry when I don't need the power of my 15"... 

[Sousuke]

25 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

how do those early i5's perform? do you get a lot of lag around macOS with one of those cpu's? I'm interested in getting a 2011 13" MacBook Pro because my 15" is a massive machine and I want something lighter to carry when I don't need the power of my 15"... 

They aren't bad little machines, cheap these days due to the age, when getting a 2011 machine you've got to test it's GPU as the 2011 machines are more notorious than the 2010 machines for this happening. 

 

No real lag around the system as long as it has an SSD in there, got to fix mine as the SSD has decided to go on strike. 

[yolosnail]

After a lot of messing about I've finally got El Capitan up and running, and I must say it feels so smooth! I guess that has something to do with the SSD, but for a 9 year old machine with only 2GB of RAM I'm surprised.

 

I ended up having to install the OS through Terminal as it kept saying the installer was damaged or corrupt, I even had to make an emergency run to Poundland to buy some blank DVDs just incase I had to burn it to a disk, but I managed to get it working with a USB drive.

I think now that i have it up and running, I'm going to make a recovery disk so should anything happen, I don't have to go through all this hassle again!

 

Now all I need to do is remember how to use Mac OS as I haven't used it since Snow Leopard!

[Ashleyyyy]

1 hour ago, Sousuke said:

They aren't bad little machines, cheap these days due to the age, when getting a 2011 machine you've got to test it's GPU as the 2011 machines are more notorious than the 2010 machines for this happening. 

 

No real lag around the system as long as it has an SSD in there, got to fix mine as the SSD has decided to go on strike. 

I'm talking about getting a 13" late 2011. those have intel graphics. I'm aware the gpu in my 15" late 2011 is prone to go bad, but I'm using fan control software to keep it cool and I'm using an app which tells me what gpu is active. 

 

+ when I bought it the previous owner said my machine was repaired for gpu failure in 2017, so it basically has a 1 year old motherboard in it. 

 

good to know those dual-core i5's don't cause lag. 

[yolosnail]

17 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

+ when I bought it the previous owner said my machine was repaired for gpu failure in 2017, so it basically has a 1 year old motherboard in it. 

 

IIRC they didn't actually fix the problem when they 'repaired' it, they just replaced the whole logic board with a new one, so you will eventually have the GPU failure

[Ashleyyyy]

15 minutes ago, yolosnail said:

IIRC they didn't actually fix the problem when they 'repaired' it, they just replaced the whole logic board with a new one, so you will eventually have the GPU failure

I'm just gonna use it until it fails. if it does fail I'll sell it as a parts machine because the rest of it is in really good condition, and replace it. 

[yolosnail]

3 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

I'm just gonna use it until it fails. if it does fail I'll sell it as a parts machine because the rest of it is in really good condition, and replace it. 

To be honest, if you parted the machine out you'd probably get more than the Macbook would be worth if it was still working. You'd be surprised how much used parts go for on Ebay.

The previous owner of my Mac Pro kept three of the Hard Drive trays so I looked on ebay thinking they would be going cheap, but people are wanting £15 each for them! To replace the three of them would cost more than I paid for the whole machine, granted I did get the machine really cheap, but that's besides the point. The Apple GT 120 that comes in the Mac Pro sell for at least £50, whereas the 'generic' GT 120 sell for £20-30

[Ashleyyyy]

2 minutes ago, yolosnail said:

To be honest, if you parted the machine out you'd probably get more than the Macbook would be worth if it was still working. You'd be surprised how much used parts go for on Ebay.

The previous owner of my Mac Pro kept three of the Hard Drive trays so I looked on ebay thinking they would be going cheap, but people are wanting £15 each for them! To replace the three of them would cost more than I paid for the whole machine, granted I did get the machine really cheap, but that's besides the point. The Apple GT 120 that comes in the Mac Pro sell for at least £50, whereas the 'generic' GT 120 sell for £20-30

but I really like it! I don't want to sell it. I'll only sell it if it's fully dead and I'm unable to fix it. I'm really happy with it. it's perfect for what I use it for and yeah.. I just don't care. I try not to think about it too much. I got a really good deal on it, and I knew what I got into when I bought it. 

 

if I didn't want to spend everyday being anxious about the gpu I would have bought a 13" MacBook Pro because those don't have dGPU's. but I didn't want to do that. a 15" is much nicer for me to use because my eyes are not great, and this resolution and size is perfect for me. 

 

but yeah, I'm fully aware of the problems with it, and I would never recommend someone buy this model. 

 

by the way, there's a reason a Mac gpu is worth more than the pc variant of it, because with a PC Card in a Mac Pro you don't get an Apple boot screen and stuff, so troubleshooting a Mac Pro with a PC Card is really difficult because unless it can fully boot up fully and the drivers load you get a black screen.