High Sierra requires a firmware update for Mac Pro Server Mid 2012

I got the impression from some notes that the following takes place

• You download and run the High Sierra installer
• It checks your Mac model and downloads the matching firmware updater
• It then sets your Mac to install that firmware update which as past firmware updates requires shutting down your Mac completely, then pressing and holding down the power button until the firmware update process starts

However I have also seen information which suggests the High Sierra installer might contain a set of the current firmware updates for supported models.

The reality maybe that each time you download the High Sierra installer it will contain all the firmware updates of that date. There is a strong indication that firmware updates might be issued quite often.

In this case the main function of the firmware update is to enable booting from an APFS drive on older Macs. As the Mac Pro 2010/2012 are some of the oldest models that support High Sierra they definitely needed this.

Apparently some people have 'extracted' the firmware updates from the download and these are installer packages and can be run separately.

The fact that many Mac models require their firmware updating before you can install High Sierra does make it at least currently much more complex to set this up as an image deployment process using e.g. DeployStudio, however once the firmware has been updated re-imaging is just as before since the firmware process is not needed again. (Unless as mentioned a subsequent newer firmware is issued.)

PS. It has been the case that in the past that firmware updtes like this have caused CD/DVD trays to open and close, I am not sure why since I don't believe the updates are changing anything to do with the drive or SATA in general but it has and does occurs.

If you follow the installation instructions, it will update the firmware on a 2012 Mac Pro, but. If you are using a non-EFI video card, you will need to use an EFI card (Apple edition ATI 5770, etc) for the firmware update, then can put your non-EFI card back after you finish the High Sierra update. Not sure why this is necessary, but at the moment, it is.

Ok, replying to myself. 🙂

Re-setting the SMC has got it working again.

The red LED flashes when insufficient time has passed to press the power button again. Waiting 15-20 seconds before depressing the power button helps.

I have an early 2009 MacPro (2 x 2.26 4-core) flashed from 4,1 to 5,1 to enable me to install Sierra. After downloading and running the High Sierra installer, i followed the instructions: clicked on "Shut Down", then after the Mac had shut down, held the power on button until I heard the long tone. Then the grey apple appeared, with the firmware update progress bar which only took a few minutes to complete. After restarting, "About this Mac" system overview now reported "Boot ROM Version: MP51.0084.B00".

High Sierra installed, and it seems that all's well.

Hi there, pdarrell, maybe i can help you.

You get the firmware update from Apple via the Internet, to the best of my understanding, you don't need a cd-rom with the firmware update on it-one doesn't exist (ah, if it were only that easy). There's a certain procedure that the High Sierra asks you to do, to do a firmware update before installing High Sierra. However, it's been my experience so far

that it doesn't "take", or at least I haven't seen any evidence that it's doing anything, eg, grey screen with Apple icon on it and progress bar, and it's my understanding, limited though it is, that you must do this firmware update, eg there is no getting around it, and with High Sierra it'll be checking the firmware on a weekly basis. I haven't found a way to get it to work at all, and until there's some kind of fix or word from Apple, I'm going to try installing it one more time then leave it for the time being. i believe your Mac will work fine with the OS it has on it for now, but I may be wrong

John B

It is the case that High Sierra does not support fusion drive configurations as of yet.

I can also say that in the past I have found firmware updates to fail like you describe if you are using a boot drive that is part of an Apple RAID.

Would either of these apply to your setup?

I forgot to add that one of my four drives is used with Carbon Copy Cloner to clone/backup my main drive. After the Boot ROM update, that drive continues to happily boot into Sierra. I have an external bootable Snow Leopard drive elsewhere - I'll check on that later and report back.

Two hard drives could be in a RAID1 or RAID0 but if they are being used as separate drives then that would not apply. I can only say that on my Mac Pro 2010 with multiple drives it worked. In the past at work a Mac Pro with RAID similar firmware updates failed.

Hi there, I have the same problem here.

I have a mid 2010 Mac Pro 5.1 with 32GB RAM, dual 6 x 3.46GHz CPUs, RX 580 graphics, Sierra on a PCIe SSD and a secondary Sierra on a Sata SSD.

My symptoms are the same as above, but I don't get the DVD drive coming out (I have two?).

I tried stripping the system down to the Sata SSD, old 5770 graphics and nothing else. Same problem.

I also found in testing that some of my startup commands won't work. For example 'Option' does NOT take me the the Startup Manager, but 'Command R' does take me to recovery. I'm not sure if it's somehow related?

Anyway, any help or guidance would be much appreciated.

Thanks

I have a Mac Pro 5,1 that I have installed High Sierra. It took many tries to install the firmware. When I would press and hold the power button, most of the time I got a bright red LED, that seemed to be in the case behind the power button. Eventually,I got the fast blinking LED and the firmware install progress bar. The bar seemed to only get about 80% of the way before the computer rebooted. I installed High Sierra and it seemed to run fine. I shut the Mac off for a few days, and now when I start, the OS Loading progress bar gets about 1/3 of the way, and then the machine shuts off. This is repeatable using any (Sierra, Yosemite,etc.) OS X disk I have tried so far. I took a video of the verbose startup and the last messages before shutdown is after a bunch of Bluetooth Host Controller messages, is something like "will permit idling" , "idle policy timeout". These messages are not exact, because I used a cheap digital camera, to record. I may, use a better camera on a tripod, if needed. Since I could not get any OS X to boot, I tried a Fedora 26, live CD, which booted but, gives a "

[ 0.118633] mce: [Hardware Error]: CPU 1: Machine Check: 0 Bank 8: ea1cf5c0008000b1

[ 0.118638] mce: [Hardware Error]: TSC 0 MISC 40000

[ 0.118642] mce: [Hardware Error]: PROCESSOR 0:206c2 TIME 1507985119 SOCKET 1 APIC 20 microcode f"

in the kernel DMESG.

I then downloaded Intel Processor Diagnostic Tool from here: "https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005567/processors.ht ml"

It started running and eventually the machine powered off suddenly. I gave up on that for the time being.

Now, I'm thinking I have a bad processor or bad memory.

I ran memtest86, for 12+ hours and it reported no errors.

Then ran Apple Diagnostic Tool, and it reports, "hardware error 4SNS/1/40000001:Ip6M-0.605", which is not a critical error AFAICT.

Some other info from AHT is Boot ROM version MP51.88Z.0084.B00.1708080528, SMC version 1.39f11.

So I'm stumped at this point, besides wondering if I need a new processor, or the firmware upgrade didn't complete fully. Any thoughts?

Ok, replying to myself (again). 🙂

My drive that was upgraded to High Sierra from Sierra still does not boot even after the SMC reset. The progress bar goes part way as I described earlier and then the machine just suddenly turns off. So, I went with a clean install of High Sierra. That drive has been up for several days now and I did reboot a couple times to test.

I must conclude some left over, or installed app from the previous Sierra Installation is causing the shut-off behavior.

Thx for reply,Mr. Lockwood

Sorry, nope just 2 hard drives in there, both on Sierra...

Jb

I just got my 2010 mac pro to install using your post Big Thank

Just out of curiosity, since you have four drive bays to work with, do you have earlier versions of OS X still installed? If so, do they continue to work with the new firmware installed?