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You should upgrade or use an alternative browser. I've been a long time user here, received a lot of help regarding my 2009 Mac Pro. Lately it's been neglected and I'm planning an upgrade.
I do read a lot before I ask, but eventually I have to ask. Instead of necroing threads, I decided to create one so my questions won't mess up half a dozen others.
The current machine:
- cMP 4,1 flashed to 5,1
- Single X5680 (stays)
- 4x16 GB reg ECC RAM (stays)
- PCI card with NVMe SSD (256 GB), macOS High Sierra (the SSD stays, but plan to have Win 11 on it)
- Radeon 4870 512 GB (boot screen) => will be upgraded to an MSI Radeon RX 570 (4GB), have the dual 6 pin to 8 pin cable already. Both cards are 150W. (new card ordered, on its way)
- Upgraded WiFi and Bluetooth in the past by 3rd party
- 4 port upgraded USB card by 3rd party
- Win7 on a 128 GB SSD in the optical bay (Boot Camp)
- 3 other disks in the caddies, media and Time Machine
- Optical drive
The goal:
- Some kind of Open Core setup in a way that I won't brick the machine
- macOS Monterey on a newer, larger and faster NVMe SSD (there's an empty PCI slot). Forum says Crucial P3 works fine.
- macOS Monterey with hardware acceleration, 4K screen as full HD retina. (MSI RX 570 should do it, forum says and seller says so)
- If I lose WiFi, no big deal. Prefer ethernet.
- If I lose Bluetooth, no big deal. Prefer cabled peripherals.
- A fresh install of Windows 11 on the old NVMe SSD
- Boot screen to choose between macOS Monterey and Windows 11
First step:
- Copy current MacOS High Sierra install from old NVMe SSD to new NVMe SSD.
Reasons:
- Eventually I want the old SSD to house a Windows 11 install
- More speed for MacOS on a new disk
- old SSD always had problems with waking up from hibernation, looking to regain ability to hibernate
- hibernation would benefit from more disk space (up to 64GB RAM to write/read to/from disk)
- would re-enable swap file thanks to greater space and speed
CCC should do the trick. What would happen though, with 2 High Sierra installs on 2 PCI SSDs? Would I get just an extra boot option? (Right now it's macOS and Win7.)
What tells the Mac Pro which disk to load the boot selector from?
If I erase the old disk, would the Mac still show a boot selector loaded from the newer SSD with the copy of High Sierra?
I'm not very confident, last time I fooled around with such things was before 2004 in the PC world. There you would set these things up in the BIOS.
Thanks in advance!