Old Mac Pro

[Stingray77]

Greeting all.

Just pulled one of our really old Mac Pros out of the back room in a clean up, specs are below. It all seem to work having be off for years. Quick question, by means of any bootable hacks etc, is there a more recent OS it can be forced into? It’s currently in 10.7.5 Lion it appears.

Any info welcome.

Serial Number:
CK74305U08S

Model:
Mac Pro (CTO) V2

Build Country:
This unit was built in Cork, Ireland.

Build Year:
This unit was built in 2007.

Build Week:
This unit was built in week 43 of that year (October).

Production Nr.:
This unit was number 198 to be built that week.

Kind regards.

 

[Dave Braine]

It would have to be a hack, as 10.7.5 is the max that it can normally take.

 

[Stingray77]

It would have to be a hack, as 10.7.5 is the max that it can normally take.

Yes, probably along the line of the DosDude Catalina Boot, but Catalina is certainly too far for this. Yosemite perhaps, if a hack even exists.

I’m sure someone will be along with some sorcery!

 

[MacsolverUK]

Hate to say this, but if you wish to run current and secure email clients and web browsers, Windows 10 is your best bet. See here:

2006 Mac Pro: Easy 64-BIT Windows 10 native installation (no bootloaders or EFI hacks)

Sharing with the community Using the below method, anyone should be able to install any version of Windows 32-BIT or 64-BIT on their Intel-Based Mac without any concern for whether the machine is EFI 32 or EFI 64, and regardless of Apple's willingness to support that version of Windows with...

forums.macrumors.com

Blutooth & sound will likely not work, but USB adapters are the simple solution.

I usually use the Windows media creation tool on a PC to create a DVD installer (legacy install) for "Another PC". Do not use a USB installer as it will likely fill up the Mac Pro boot ROM with security certificates and the Mac will not boot again into any OS. You may need to use an older Windows 10 ISO to make the DVD as the current W10 ISO is too big for a single sided DVD disk.

 

[Stingray77]

Hate to say this, but if you wish to run current and secure email clients and web browsers, Windows 10 is your best bet. See here:

2006 Mac Pro: Easy 64-BIT Windows 10 native installation (no bootloaders or EFI hacks)

Sharing with the community Using the below method, anyone should be able to install any version of Windows 32-BIT or 64-BIT on their Intel-Based Mac without any concern for whether the machine is EFI 32 or EFI 64, and regardless of Apple's willingness to support that version of Windows with...

forums.macrumors.com

Blutooth & sound will likely not work, but USB adapters are the simple solution.

I usually use the Windows media creation tool on a PC to create a DVD installer (legacy install) for "Another PC". Do not use a USB installer as it will likely fill up the Mac Pro boot ROM with security certificates and the Mac will not boot again into any OS. You may need to use an older Windows 10 ISO to make the DVD as the current W10 ISO is too big for a single sided DVD disk.

We ended up putting OS El Capitan on that one, via the 'Pikers Boot' hack, works absolutely fine, and have photo archives kept on it now. We are currently replacing our newer 'cheesegrater' 5.1 and 6.1 Pros with Mac Studios. 👍

 

[Ben J.]

My first thoughts, having used a 2008 mac pro as my main machine for a decade:

I stayed on 10.7.5 for many years before I got into newer OS and hardware, and I had no problems with that. Everything worked, Adobe stuff, DAWs, some apps I needed to not upgrade, but they still worked. I think Lion is fine. I also had a partition with OSX 10.6.8 that I used specifically to use older audio hardware and software. So, my advise would be to try running it with Lion and see how many, if any, hoops you have to jump thru to make it work, before you get into the OCLP hack thing.

The best thing I did for my old MP was to buy a Sonnet PCIe adapter card for SSDs. Very inexpensive, and the SSDs can be cheap also. This gets you at least 5x the speed of your old HDs, and really breaths new life into the mac. Boot-up, app launch, everything becomes more snappy.

Next best thing I did was to install more ram. The effect you get from this depends on what you use the MP for, but the old RAM chips that fit on this mac should be very cheap by now.

I would try this route first, and later you can make another partition and try out a hack with a more recent version of macOS.

 

[Regulus67]

We ended up putting OS El Capitan on that one, via the 'Pikers Boot' hack, works absolutely fine, and have photo archives kept on it now. We are currently replacing our newer 'cheesegrater' 5.1 and 6.1 Pros with Mac Studios. 👍

You could run macOS Server on it. I do that on my Mac Pro 3.1 with El Capitan.

OS X El Capitan Server