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User profile for user: ricejonathand
ricejonathand Author
User level: Level 1
0 points

HELP MY POOR MAC PRO 5,1 I want my OS back

I was trying to keep my internal drive as is and I added a 1tb drive to turn into a gaming drive using teh emulator Lakka for retro games. Somehow both drives are now wiped and ONLY boot into GRUB using the LAKKA emulator as the OS. I have done every single combo with booting and button. i cannot reinstall a OS, the only keys to stop the boot is holding down options which lets me bootinto one of 2 EFI drives and I tried to boot a USB it wont talke my Sonoma, Big Sur, and El Captian and OSX seem to not be good copies. Big Sur also freezes all the time on amy mac. How can i get a normal OS running Ipromis not to do this again. I also was running a day prior Sonoma to check it out through Opencore, but never got to use it for long. I just want my machine back both my original drive the main one is messed up and the spare drive. I have 2 others I bought but not formatted, they are old from a neighbors garage and may or may not work. Also have a mac air, usbs and a pc but thhe other one i am developing a game on. thanks to be clear i striet cmb, opt, r, p - cmd r, shift, opt, cmd r, also with s, and also opt alaone which works best. I get the terminal but cant type and get error=-32

Mac Pro, macOS 14.4

Posted on May 4, 2024 7:07 AM

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User profile for user: Kurt Lang
Kurt Lang
User level: Level 9
63,356 points

May 4, 2024 7:18 AM in response to ricejonathand

A 5,1 Mac Pro cannot run anything higher than Mojave, and then only if you put in a third party video card that supports Metal.


Click the High Sierra link on this page. That will open the App Store and allow you to download an official, full version installer.


Then on the Mac you used to download High Sierra, use the Terminal command on this page (for High Sierra, of course), to create a bootable USB drive. I think an 8 GB drive is big enough. Take that completed USB drive over to the Mac Pro and use it to install High Sierra.


For the Terminal command, you alter it slightly at the end. It reads:


sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyVolume


The very last name gets changed to whatever the name of the USB drive is you're going to use. The easiest thing to do is to first rename the flash drive to something very simple. Like the letter a. Then the command is:


sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/a

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User profile for user: Kurt Lang
Kurt Lang
User level: Level 9
63,356 points

May 4, 2024 8:14 AM in response to ricejonathand

Terminal is an app in the /Applications/Utilities folder, not a startup option.


Since you can't start up the 5,1 Mac Pro, you're going to have to do all of the above steps from another Mac. Then use the completed, bootable USB drive on the Mac Pro.


Once the flash drive is ready, you begin with the Mac Pro powered down. Plug in the flash drive. Turn the Mac Pro on and immediately hold down the Option key. Keep holding the key until the Boot Manager screen appears. Choose the USB drive to boot to. Once it's at the work screen, choose to install High Sierra on one of the internal drives.


Depending on what you did to those drives with GRUP an LAKKA, you may need to first run Disk Utility to reformat the drive(s) with a GUID partition map, and Mac OS Extended as the format. YOU WILL lose all data on the drive when you do that.

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HELP MY POOR MAC PRO 5,1 I want my OS back

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