residue of un-installed rEFInd causing odd behavior ?
An EFI boot manager utility
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Awhile back, I installed rEFInd on my Mac Pro 5,1 Desktop in order to be able to run Mojave with a metal-capable GPU that doesn't support the boot screen. Got that working, but then I realized Photoshop CS5 wouldn't work on Mojave. So I decided to make it dual-boot, High Sierra and Mojave, but the metal-capable GPU didn't work properly with High Sierra. So I gave up and un-installed rEFInd and decided to stay at High Sierra on this machine.
My machine is now exhibiting some odd behavior and I wonder if it has anything to do with rEFInd, specifically the fact that I set the machine to always boot up to rEFInd (where I could then select which MacOS to boot).
Here's the behavior ... Even though it contains two bootable disks, when I try to activate the Startup Manager (hold alt-option key during startup) nothing happens - it just boots up normally. I know both disks are bootable, because I can startup on the other if I select it in SystemPrefs->StartupDisk. So I tried resetting the SMC (unplug power cord, wait 15sec, plug cord back in, wait 5sec, power up). Then I tried resetting the NVRAM/PRAM (hold option-command-P-R during startup) and again it booted up normally, instead of repeating the startup chime every 20sec for as long as you're holding those keys. And again, no access to the StartupManager.
Ideas ? Is this something I failed to undo when I backed out of rEFInd ?
Not sure how to delete my post. My problem has nothing to do with rEFInd. The problem was that I ad my keyboard plugged into an after-market PCI USB card, so the system was not seeing the keys I was pressing (for PRAM/NVRAM reset, or Startup Manager). Apparently that card is not active until the machine is booted.
MODERATOR: Please feel free to delete this thread.
Was it a USB 3.x card? Old Mac Pros don't have a EFI driver built-in for XHCI USB controllers.
There is source code available (in edk2, Clover, and OpenCore) but some minor changes need to be made to make it compatible with EFI 1.1 instead of just UEFI 2.x. Even with such changes it may require other tweaks to work with the USB stack of EFI 1.1. Once the driver is working, it can be installed to an EFI partition and loaded by the nvram Driver#### mechanism (loads before the Startup Manager), or it can be loaded by rEFInd (loads after the Startup Manager). Then you can connect stuff to the USB card. There's no timeframe for when someone will get around to finishing the EFI driver.
Yeah, it is USB 3. Thanks for explaining why it doesn't work. Not too worried about it though. I mainly bought this card to try to get better speeds with USB flash drives (which I'm unimpressed by the improvement). No reason to have my monitor and keyboard plugged into it (the keyboard plugs into the monitor, one of the Apple Cinema Displays that has Firewire and USB ports on the rear).
I guess this thread is worth keeping, could help someone. Maybe a different title though: "Apple startup keystrokes not working"
Right. The XHCI EFI driver would be most useful for booting from 10 Gbps USB devices (since USB 2.0 is limited to 480 Mb/s and FireWire from the display is limited to 400 Mb/s and FireWire from the Mac Pro is limited to 800 Mb/s). But keyboard and mouse are also useful tests of the driver.