Big Bertha's Big Brother:Asus Z10PE-D8 WS Dual Xeon Broadwell v4 CPU's 64GB DDR4 ECC RDIMM RAM

[TpwUK]

ca
can u please share the EFI from ur installer boot? I am now thinking may be its my dual Xeons again. I did manage to boot and do a clean install from my dual Xeons after I installed em both. So I was very confident ur 5.1 EFI works great with both xeons installed. Tried and failed. Now i am very hesitant to take it out and reinstall since I got 12x hdds, 4xssd raid setup.

There is rumour that Apple has started to use the EFI partition more, and is storing something that is shared across all the other EFI partitions it finds on your computer hence the need to delete all of those other EFI partitions that are not required. I don't dual boot here so the only EFI partition I require is on the boot SSD and then of course the USB installer.

I post the EFI here as a zip archive - You will need to create a new Serial Number, SMUID and Board SN. Make sure the serial number you generate is valid before using it.

Martin

 

[dude05]

There is rumour that Apple has started to use the EFI partition more, and is storing something that is shared across all the other EFI partitions it finds on your computer hence the need to delete all of those other EFI partitions that are not required. I don't dual boot here so the only EFI partition I require is on the boot SSD and then of course the USB installer.

I post the EFI here as a zip archive - You will need to create a new Serial Number, SMUID and Board SN. Make sure the serial number you generate is valid before using it.

Martin

Thanks. Will check and report back.

I came across another strange problem. I got 11x 4tb drives over areca 1882ix-16 as raid5 and 4x 1tb 850evo ssd as raid 5 as well. In my bootlog, it shows up. It was mounting fine till today morning and then it disappeared. Bootlog attached.

I have noticed that my Nvidia device manager fail to load when my Raid is loaded. But when Nvidia is loaded, the raid doesnt load. Its in there but it wont show up in diskutil list or gui disk utility. But inside my areca webbased browser, it shows up fine. Any idea why its happening??

I have EFI on multiple drives. I think i will clean it up and make sure I only got 1x EFI that boots.

 

[TpwUK]

Thanks. Will check and report back.

I came across another strange problem. I got 11x 4tb drives over areca 1882ix-16 as raid5 and 4x 1tb 850evo ssd as raid 5 as well. In my bootlog, it shows up. It was mounting fine till today morning and then it disappeared. Bootlog attached.

I have noticed that my Nvidia device manager fail to load when my Raid is loaded. But when Nvidia is loaded, the raid doesnt load. Its in there but it wont show up in diskutil list or gui disk utility. But inside my areca webbased browser, it shows up fine. Any idea why its happening??

I have EFI on multiple drives. I think i will clean it up and make sure I only got 1x EFI that boots.

I don't use RAID so I can't offer any advice sorry. Is it possible for you to use the Intel RST RAID controller on the motherboard ? I know the manual says you need to use a jumper switch to activate it, and then that will provide RAID5 support directly on the motherboard/BIOS and should not require any additional 3rd party software. I suspect that your RAID software might not be happy with whatever the new SIP settings seem to have changed with 10.12.2. This however wouldn't make sense regarding the Nvidia, for this to happen it may suggest that there is a PCIe conflict happening where this could be the number of lanes being used is too great for one CPU to manage.

Referring to boot log:
VBoxHFS-64.efi - This should be deleted, I don't know if that could knock out raid though, but it shouldn't be there.

Other than that I see no issues in your boot log

Martin

 

[dude05]

Referring to boot log:
VBoxHFS-64.efi - This should be deleted, I don't know if that could knock out raid though, but it shouldn't be there.

Other than that I see no issues in your boot log

Martin

Found out the problem. I switched my raid card from pcie3 slot to pcie5 to drop in my second titanX. And that screwed me up. Dropped it back in Pcie3 slot. All back to normal.

But new problem. My Hwmonitor and Istat says cpu heatsink is at 104degrees. So I am looking at replacing it with liquid coolers now. Even had a sudden restart most likely caused by the cpu temp.

Did u ever get El Capitan to work in ur box???

I have this question regarding why USB didnt boot afterwards. Once I get the usb stick with ur 5.1 efi to boot, does it automatically change something in the EFI or boot usb??? like add DSDT/SSDT or some parameters which stick to it? Coz I am thinking when i boot it on a single Xeon, it sticks and that helped me boot into the dual Xeons and do my installation. But then the dual Xeons updated something on my USB stick which now prevent further boot. Is that even a possibility?


thanks.

 

[TpwUK]

Found out the problem. I switched my raid card from pcie3 slot to pcie5 to drop in my second titanX. And that screwed me up. Dropped it back in Pcie3 slot. All back to normal.

Yeah that would make sense, especially if you have created a DSDT

But new problem. My Hwmonitor and Istat says cpu heatsink is at 104degrees. So I am looking at replacing it with liquid coolers now. Even had a sudden restart most likely caused by the cpu temp.

If that stays constant as 104 degrees then it's probably telling you lies.

Did u ever get El Capitan to work in ur box???

Not tried El-Cap on this board yet, the Z9 board loved El-Cap though, but wouldn't take Sierra ... Go figure

I have this question regarding why USB didnt boot afterwards. Once I get the usb stick with ur 5.1 efi to boot, does it automatically change something in the EFI or boot usb??? like add DSDT/SSDT or some parameters which stick to it? Coz I am thinking when i boot it on a single Xeon, it sticks and that helped me boot into the dual Xeons and do my installation. But then the dual Xeons updated something on my USB stick which now prevent further boot. Is that even a possibility?

There is unsubstantiated rumours that started with El-Cap that something strange was happening with regards to the EFI partition and how Apple was now starting to use this more than before. These rumours pretty much settled on saying that the computer that created the USB boot installer for the new OS had to be the same computer it was going to be installed on to, and that some kind of identifier was being used and backed up across UEFI/EFI partitions and possibly on the motherboard too. So every time you created a new GUID partition this data was also being stored in the newly created EFI partition. The long and the short of it is that your hardware has to match what it was at install time and that you have the same SMBios and Runtime Variables as used by the USB Installer which should ideally be the same as the computer that dowloaded/created that installer.

The problem is, and is probably why the rumours don't hold water, is that this would be no good to admins that could use the USB Installer across networked Apple computers ... But since those computers have their own firmware that would stay constant or be upgraded via the installer. So, again those same data areas that we have to emulate at boot don't apply to real Mac's but could be being manipulated via whatever method(s) employed and can all be tied into your AppleID. It's all pretty clever stuff really but a darned nuisance which is all it has to be to start putting people off from using Hacintosh computers.

Martin

 

[dude05]

rebooted in windows today to test the temperature. same 104degrees. attached hwinfo file. i am not sure if its heatsink or something else. cpu seems to be cool. just the heatsink is overheated.

gonna get liquid coolers this weekend and change things. since i am gonna remove the heatsink, i am planning to reinstall osx.
want to try Elcapitan and also try macpro6.1

i also noticed my USB 3.0 is not peforming well. did u face something similar?

 

[TpwUK]

rebooted in windows today to test the temperature. same 104degrees. attached hwinfo file. i am not sure if its heatsink or something else. cpu seems to be cool. just the heatsink is overheated.

gonna get liquid coolers this weekend and change things. since i am gonna remove the heatsink, i am planning to reinstall osx.
want to try Elcapitan and also try macpro6.1

i also noticed my USB 3.0 is not peforming well. did u face something similar?

I have read somewhere before that even though the heatsink mount looks symmetrical that they are not and sometimes they need to be rotated by 90 degrees to get a better fit/contact to the cpu. I remember with my Z9 liquid cooled box that the heatsink always told lies and it was just some arbitrary number. CPU temps and fan speeds were accurate though.

Other than when using CSM the USB3 ports have no issues. CSM set as enabled = No USB3 boot and the system hangs if you try

Martin

 

[dude05]

I have read somewhere before that even though the heatsink mount looks symmetrical that they are not and sometimes they need to be rotated by 90 degrees to get a better fit/contact to the cpu. I remember with my Z9 liquid cooled box that the heatsink always told lies and it was just some arbitrary number. CPU temps and fan speeds were accurate though.

Other than when using CSM the USB3 ports have no issues. CSM set as enabled = No USB3 boot and the system hangs if you try

Martin

my heatsinks i had to position towards top of the case. heatsinks are supermicro ones from my previous box and that was giving me hardtime mounting and removing DIMM's coz of their close proximity to cpu. so i mounted it towards top. i was already a bit paranoid wondering if that could be the reason.

USB3.0 performance is horrible. yday copied 800GB to a usb3 drive. took 7 hrs. my CSM is turned off. Do i need a usb 3.0 driver somewhere to get it working good.

 

[TpwUK]

my heatsinks i had to position towards top of the case. heatsinks are supermicro ones from my previous box and that was giving me hardtime mounting and removing DIMM's coz of their close proximity to cpu. so i mounted it towards top. i was already a bit paranoid wondering if that could be the reason.

USB3.0 performance is horrible. yday copied 800GB to a usb3 drive. took 7 hrs. my CSM is turned off. Do i need a usb 3.0 driver somewhere to get it working good.

There is no kext required but I got better performance using the Intel over the ASMedia USB3 controllers. You can set this in the BIOS.

Martin

 

[dude05]

There is no kext required but I got better performance using the Intel over the ASMedia USB3 controllers. You can set this in the BIOS.

Martin

Finally took out a cpu, installed 10.12.2, the old usb worked fine once i took out the cpu but i think the guy who sold me Z10 nd CosmosII messed up on the usb connections. i think usb3 is connected to 2.0. something not right about it. it booted when it was in usb3.0 port but not in usb 2.0 port. bootup using ur agdp=Mac-xxxx code and installed new drivers and everything. dropped in second Xeon. all good. Changed SMBIOS to 6.1 from ur 5.1 EFI. and all looks good.

Tried to boot using Elcapitan USB with ur 5.1/6.1 EFI's. no luck in there. I am hoping the glitches i had with 10.12.1 on graphics will disappear now. will report back tomm.