Move from Hackintosh to Mac Pro 5,1

[kkolema]

Hi All,

This is my first post. I originally installed Hackintosh to my home machine because I needed a bit more power than what decently priced Macs could offer and lacked money to buy a new Mac Pro. That was back in 2012 and all was good until last year when the machine started to experience random freezes and perhaps a problem with SSD or something since booting failed about 30% of the time. I struggled with it until now when I updated to Sierra and was not able to properly boot at all. I had put home folders to two HD's in RAID.

I had no time to hack so I went and bought 2010 5,1 Mac Pro. I did want to avoid all the installation and migration headaches so I just plugged the very same SSD and HDs into the Mac Pro not expecting much success, but to my surprise everything seemed to work all right and suddenly I didn't have to spend all evening re installing everything.

Only "problem" I have is that since the Hackintosh was pretending to be iMac, some hardware description setting is still set to that and when I run for example geekbench it thinks the system is iMac.

So my question is that can I some how change that? Or is there a neat way of getting rid of all the hackintosh changes to system files? like running OS X installer but not actually install anything else than the OS?

P.S. That old 3.2GHz quad core 5,1 Mac pro only looses by 10% to 2015 MacBook Pro in single thread benchmark while being 50% faster in multicore metrics. With about 200 EUR of additional updates it would beat the MacBook Pro with good margin, which enough for me (for now).

 

[oldMac7]

You could try doing a clean install on a different drive then try a migration. Even if it doesn't work I'd still do a clean install and start fresh IMO.
PS - Welcome to the cheese grater club Change your profile, let's see what you got!

 

[kkolema]

Thanks for the tip. I think it might be also OK to do time machine backup and then do migration. Good old fashioned spring cleaning of home folder would probably be best, but it just takes so much time...

 

[mikeb1949]

As a person who started several years ago with a donated to me machine and several hundred hours of work to get a very stable Hackintosh, I migrated to a 27 in 2017 iMac. I got older and decided I just did not want to face the possibility of one day losing all my work and programs on the Hack so I bit the bullet and went to a real Apple machine. It is a joy and I really like it but upgrading the OS has become more of a problem than with my Hackintosh. I think this is because when I migrated to the iMac from the Hackintosh some of the files (kexts) that the iMac does not need came over and has been causing me issues with upgrades ever since. I have done a clean install of OS X 12.14 (Mojave) but I just had the same upgrade issues with going to 14.1 and it is very frustrating.

I wish someone in the know would develop some instructions for the few of us who want to move from the Hackintosh to a full fledged Mac. Probably not the best place to ask for this but I think this is where the knowledge would be.

By the way, I still have great admiration for all the folks who have developed the tools to build a Hackintosh. I absolutely loved mine and if I had not just gotten lazy, I would have stayed with it.

thanks