I have purchased Apple refurbed products in the past directly from The Apple Store website, however, these days, Apple only offer current models, in this case being the Mac Pro 6.1. By luck, I came across a company called MacBank who specialize in refurbishing and upgrading old Mac Pro towers into 5.1 2012 spec with modern powerful components. It happened on a MacBook Pro 2011 and Mac mini 2010, used Catalina patcher from dosdude. Only thing similar that both system shared is their SSDs are from the same brand. Where My Upgraded Cheese-grater Mac Pro 5,1 Sit Compared To Other Computers. Below are the benchmarks tests for Multi-Core tests on Geekbench 4 and my upgraded Mac Pro 5,1 cheese-grater would slot in just under a late 2013 3.0GHz 8 core Mac Pro trash can and it would take a 3.2GHz i7 Mac Mini 2018 to beat it.

1. Mac Pro 5 1 Catalina Opencore
2. Upgrade Mac Pro 5 1 To Catalina 2020
3. Mac Pro 5 1 Catalina Boot Camp

This is a bit of a throwback to my article from May of last year – Tri-Booting a Mac Pro 2,1 – not long before I had just procured my Mac Pro 5,1 (well technically a 4,1 that was flashed to a 5,1 with dual Intel Xeon 5680 CPUs with 12 cores at 3.33 GHz). That May 2020 article in itself was a bit of GPU madness with me employing 3 different cards for various purposes. The GPU madness this year is a bit of a different story, but at the end of the day comes down to the same conclusion for my use case but with just 2 of those 3 cards being used.

This 5,1 is a very powerful machine and has been an incredible pleasure to own so far (grabbed for under $1000 shipped on eBay last year). As fate would have it, I had been quite satisfied with the performance I was getting from the GTX 980Ti in my 2,1 last year and got another. While I was fully aware of the limits of the NVidia web drivers last year (High Sierra was the end of the line), these 980/980Ti cards and their successors – the 1080 and 1080Ti are great options for the Mac Pro 5,1 running High Sierra with the NVidia Web Drivers. It is a shame you can’t really push these cards any further.

The only trouble is that with the NVidia cards running Web Drivers, if power is interrupted or if you ever need to reset the PRAM, the default goes back to the Mac Default driver, giving you a dark screen and no video when booting your Mac back up. The fail-safe is to always have a backup low powered video card running “in tandem” in another slot that can produce a boot screen or boot natively with no special drivers. NVidia Maxwell and Pascal cards (like the 980Ti and 1080Ti) unfortunately require these special web drivers (Kepler cards like the Titan Black 6 GB or GTX 780Ti however have native MacOS drivers and do not require dedicated web drivers).

In my case (and in the case of many others) just like I discussed in last year’s article, a great option for that secondary video card is the Radeon HD 2600 XT. Why this card in particular though?? What’s so special about it? This card not only provides you a boot screen, but also provides you with the ability to boot into Snow Leopard and get full 3D acceleration (yes it’s a weak card – even for Snow Leopard overall, but it’s better than no 3D acceleration at all and gets you up and running when you need it to). What’s more is that it only takes up a single slot. No overhang – no large fan or heat sink sticking out preventing you from installing other cards.. it’s just a single slot wide. It also requires no additional auxiliary power and will work in all versions of the cMP (Classic Mac Pro) from the 2006 1,1 to the 2012 version of the 5,1.

These requirements were all especially important to me after recently upgrading to NVMe Storage (more on that in another article). With my GTX 980Ti in Slot 1 (lower slot) at 16x, my recently acquired PCIe NVMe RAID card (WD AN1500 1 TB) in slot 2 (capped at 8x in the 16x slot) and my flashed GC Titan Ridge in slot 4 (rated at 4x in that 4x slot), all that I had left was slot 3 for a GPU that produces a boot screen and it had to be single wide. Despite the fact that slot 3 is just 4x, that’s more than enough bandwidth for this low rated card, which is only going to be used to push 1080p 60Hz anyway and mainly just be used for boot screens, so PCIe v2 at 4x was plenty for that card.

The Metal Conundrum with NVidia and AMD

Let’s say you aren’t going to use a Titan Ridge, and you don’t care about NVMe storage and don’t care about Snow Leopard but want to run your 980Ti or 1080Ti for Windows 10 and High Sierra and you also want to run Mojave and Catalina using a supported card. You could technically put something like an ITX RX 560 4 GB in Slot 2 which is low powered as well (if you just needed a display card for Mojave/Catalina), but not so fast.. at least in High Sierra for sure. When you boot High Sierra with the NVidia Web Drivers for a Maxwell or Pascal NVidia card and you have an AMD metal card present, a driver clash occurs and since you have no boot screen, you’re now stuck. You’ll get to the login screen but can go no further. You then have to zap the PRAM and only use the RX 560, so at that point it becomes a useless exercise to try running High Sierra with the NVidia Web Drivers and a low powered AMD Metal card like the RX 560 also installed. So if you configure a Mac Pro 5,1 with a 980Ti/1080Ti and RX 560, you might as well just not even bother counting on using the higher powered cards in MacOS at all (at least High Sierra), which is a real bummer.

Note: If you go to Mojave or later (without OpenCore), say goodbye to Snow Leopard

Be aware that the minute you boot into Mojave or later (and you are not using OpenCore), if you have a non-Metal EFI card installed like the AMD HD 2600 XT, you’ll get an error and won’t be able to boot into the OS at all. I have not tried running my PC (non-flashed, non-EFI) Radeon 5670 simultaneously yet, so it may be an option for 3D acceleration with OpenCore running and may not trigger the clash.

Why not just use a Radeon RX 580 or 5700 XT and call it a Day?

This is a tricky one, but it’s only tricky for if you’re a gamer. If you’re using your Mac Pro 5,1 for gaming as well like I do in Windows 10, the 980Ti is still significantly faster than the RX 580 while the 1080Ti literally smokes the RX 580, so both NVidia cards provide a ton of bang for the buck and are far more powerful for gaming and FPS than the RX 580.

Courtesy of the GPU Gaming Score Aggregator, UserBenchmark, see the scores accordingly:

Like anything though there are two sides to the story.. If gaming is not important to you at all and you are only using your Mac with MacOS, the RX 580 is actually the better overall value for the 5,1 due to the Metal performance (it’s much better for Metal intensive apps than the 980Ti and even slightly better than the 1080Ti. Check out the Geekbench Metal Results Browser for those GPUs:

Radeon RX 580: 44803

Geforce 1080Ti: 43386

Geforce 980Ti: 26765

As for the Radeon 5700 XT.. it wins versus the 980Ti for gaming, but loses to the 1080Ti. It wins versus both on Metal scores, but surprisingly Metal performance is not a major leap over the RX 580.

5700 XT Gaming comparison (again from UserBenchmark):

Metal performance came out to 49803, giving you a good 10% speed boost over the RX 580 for Metal intensive work like video encoding in the current releases of iMovie/FCPX, etc.

The 5700 XT requires Catalina to run stable (simple patch for the 5,1 with the dosdude1 patch since Mojave was the last official version for the Mac Pro 5,1 or you can use OpenCore and even get boot screens). The 5700 XT is simply prohibitive from a cost standpoint though and is why I would not recommend it right now (see “The Final Verdict” below):

The Final Verdict

The problem in all of this is that we’re still in the world of the pandemic where people are still playing it safe and riding it out staying at home for the most part. Lots of new people have gotten into PC gaming this year and last year and the same thing has happened with crypto-currency mining (all these indoor hobbies have simply blown up). Couple that with greedy eBay bot scalpers and a global shortage on semi-conductors and you have a real mess on your hands for the GPU market, so what’s the best value overall right now?

If you’re a gamer, I’m going to stand by my continued assessment of the GTX 980Ti or 1080Ti and a Radeon HD 2600 boot card to have as a backup for boot screens in case of issues with the NVidia Web Drivers (be patient on the HD 2600 – some sellers want over $100 and some $150 for these relics.. they’re worth $50 to $60 – don’t pay much more than that unless you are desperate). You won’t be able to run Mojave or later for now in that tandem setup for MacOS (again due to the web driver limitations), but High Sierra has a little bit of life left and will likely get you by until the prices come down, plus you’ll be very happy with the performance of the 980Ti and 1080Ti for Windows 10 gaming. People are lauding the RTX 3k series and 2k series for the Ray Tracing and the fact that they are better crypto mining cards, so you are seeing the market saturated with 980/980Ti and 1080/1080Ti cards right now – all great for gaming and VR and good to excellent Metal performance. While they too are slightly elevated in price (980Ti was going for $200-$250 last year and is currently trending $350 to $400 while the 1080Ti was trending $500 or so last year and has not changed much).

If you’re not a gaming enthusiast, the RX 580 is the way to go. It will run Mojave and later and offers plenty of power. Even in today’s elevated eBay market, you can find these cards for around $300-$400 on average if you look around (sadly they were under $200 last year).

What about that AMD Radeon 5700 XT? It seemed like a winner.. Best Metal score versus the RX 580, GTX 980Ti and 1080Ti and better gaming scores than the 980Ti. The problem is that this card was retailing for $400 to $500 last year on average. It now retails for $649 (for the PowerColor Red Devil variant) and is trending for $1000 to $1500 right now on eBay for all variants.. that’s an insulting double the retail price! Thanks a lot scalpers. The value just isn’t there on the 5700 XT right now and for the premiums the standard 5700, 5600 XT and 5500 XT are going for (all $100s over retail), it just not a great idea to move to a Navi card unless you absolutely must run Catalina and later on your 5,1.

As a last note, I should also mention the Vega 56 – an overlooked card. Equal to about the 980Ti for gaming, but scores over 64,000 on Metal and falls within TDP for the Mac Pro 5,1. It’s probably worth looking at and most have been passing it over for the Navi cards like the 5700 XT. It will also run Mojave giving you 32-bit App Support.

Good luck on your GPU hunt during this time of March (GPU) madness!

Apple’s latest macOS, Catalina, has just been released to the public last October 7, 2019 and you can now install it on your Mac, as long as your device meets the hardware requirements. First revealed during the WWDC 2019 conference in San Jose, California, macOS Catalina introduces some new exciting features and functionalities.

As we say goodbye to iTunes, macOS Catalina brings in new apps and features to the table, including Apple Music, Podcasts Books, and TV. Another major feature is Sidecar, which can turn your iPad into another display. For ordinary users, this means getting a secondary display for free. For developers, on the other hand, this secondary screen can be used as a drawing tablet using supported apps.

With the release of macOS Catalina 10.15, a lot of Mac users are enthusiastic to install the newest Mac operating system. Just like the previous versions of macOS, some were able to upgrade without a hitch, but several users encountered various issues during downloading and installation of the update.

Some users experienced slow downloading of the update, while others got error messages when installing Catalina, including:

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• Storage system verify or repair failed
• This copy of the Install application can’t be verified. It may have been corrupted or tampered with during downloading.
• An error occurred while preparing the installation. Try running again.
• Copy of install macOS application is damaged and can’t be used to install macOS.
• There is not enough free space on the selected volume.

This guide will give you a detailed rundown of the most common macOS Catalina installation and update errors encountered by Mac users when upgrading or installing macOS Catalina, along with the instructions on how to deal with these hiccups.

Why macOS Catalina Won’t Install

Various problems can occur during the installation of macOS Catalina. If the installation won’t start, seems to freeze midway , or never seems to complete, then it means that there must be something wrong somewhere.

The first main reason why users can’t install macOS Catalina is compatibility problem. If your Mac doesn’t support macOS Catalina, you won’t be able to proceed with the installation. You need a fairly recent Mac to be able to run macOS Catalina. Here are the Mac models that support the newest macOS:

• MacBook (2015) and later
• MacBook Air (2012) and later
• MacBook Pro (2012) and later
• Mac Mini (2012) and later
• iMac (2012) and later
• iMac Pro (2017) and later
• Mac Pro (2013) and later

If your device is not on this list, then you’re sure to run into problems when installing Catalina.

Another thing you need to check before installation is your available storage space. You will need around 6.5 GB just to download the installer. Once you’ve downloaded it, the amount of space you will need during the installation depends on whether you’re doing a clean install or an upgrade.

A clean install will eat up around 20 GB of storage. On top of that, you have to make room for apps, user data, and user updates. An upgrade install, on the other hand, will only take up 6.5 GB of space for the installer, plus some installation files that the installer will copy to your startup drive.

If you’re tight on storage space, you should consider removing unneeded apps and files on your Mac. You can uninstall the apps one by one, and delete cache files and data using Mac repair app. Make sure you have at least 25 GB of free space to be able to install macOS Catalina successfully.

Aside from compatibility issues and insufficient storage, poor internet connection, incomplete or corrupted installation files, hard disk problems, and faulty software can also cause issues during the installation of macOS Catalina.

Installation Checklist for macOS Catalina

Before proceeding with the installation, it is necessary to spend some time ticking off the checklist below. These steps will not only prevent errors from happening, but also ensure that your data remains safe in case something goes wrong.

• Back up your Mac, especially your iTunes media library since Catalina will no longer have iTunes.
• Take note of the 32-bit apps on your Mac . You will need to update them to the 64-bit version after upgrading, or find an alternative for them.
• Delete old Install macOS files from your Applications folder. These old macOS installation files may cause error during the upgrade.
• Remove all external drives and accessories.
• Plug in your Mac’s power adapter.
• Connect to a stable Wi-Fi network.

Once you’ve completed these steps, you can now proceed with the upgrade.

How to Upgrade to macOS Catalina

The easiest way to download and install macOS Catalina is through the App Store on your Mac. Just open the App Store and search for macOS Catalina. Click the install button to start downloading, then click Continue.

You can also visit the macOS Catalina website and download the installer from there. The installer will be downloaded to the Applications folder on your Mac. Once downloaded, the installer will open by itself. Just follow the onscreen instructions to proceed with the installation. You might be asked to log in using your admin username and password during the process.

As long as your device is compatible with Catalina and you’ve followed the instructions, you’ll be able to successfully install the new macOS on your Mac. But if you encounter any error during the download or installation, refer to our guide below to sort out the issue.

How to Fix Common Download Errors for macOS Catalina

Downloading the installer is the first step of the installation process. The installer takes up 6.5GB of storage, but you will need more space to be able to run the new macOS smoothly. If you have Automatic Updates enabled, the installer might already be downloaded on your device.

If the installer has not yet been downloaded, go to the Apple menu > System Preferences > Software Update to download Catalina.

If the downloading process gets stuck or is taking a long time to complete, here’s what you can do:

1. Go to the Apple Server status website and check if the macOS Software Update‘s button is green. If not, then there’s probably some issues with the website, so you might need to try upgrading some other time.
2. If the macOS Software Update is green, but you’re still having download problems, check your internet connection. Consider switching to a wired internet connection if possible.
3. If the download is stuck for a long time, cancel it by clicking the X button.
4. Switch to a different DNS server and retry the download again.

It might take a few attempts for the downloading to be successful, especially in the early days of the release of the update.

How to Fix Errors When Preparing for the Installation of macOS Catalina

Mac Pro 5 1 Catalina Opencore

Once you have successfully downloaded the installer to your device, the system then prepares your Mac for the installation process. There are users who encountered errors during this stage and came across the Error occurred preparing the installation. Try running the applicationagain message.

The first thing you need to do when you encounter this error is to reboot your Mac. You might need to restart your system a couple of times to deal with this problem. If the error doesn’t go away after rebooting, here are some steps you can try:

Check Your Mac’s System Date and Time.

An incorrect system time usually gets in the way of a lot of system processes, including updates. To make sure your Mac’s date and time are correct, follow the instructions below:

1. Go to the Apple menu > System Preferences > Date & Time.
2. Tick off Set Date and Time Automatically.
3. If the option is already checked, uncheck it then reboot your Mac.
4. Go back to the Date and Time panel and check the option again.
5. Next, try re-installing macOS Catalina.

Re-Download the Installer.

If the step above did not work, you might have to delete the macOS Catalina installer on your Applications folder. Find the Install macOS file in the Applications folder and move it to the Trash. Empty the Trash and reboot. Once your Mac restarts, try downloading the installer and then run the install process again.

Delete the Installinfo.plist File.

If you encounter the Copy of install macOS application is damaged and cant be used to install macOS error during the preparation of the installation, the best workaround is to delete the installinfo.plist from the installer package, then try re-installing.

To delete the installinfo.plist file, check out the steps below:

1. Go to the Applications folder and look for the installer package for macOS Catalina. It is usually named Install macOS.
2. Right-click on the file and select Show Package Contents.
3. Click on Contents > SharedSupport.
4. Delete the Installlnfo.plist inside the folder.
5. Type in your admin password to confirm the action.
6. Click on the installer to run it again.

How to Fix Catalina Installation Errors on Mac

After preparing your Mac, the system then proceeds to the installation process. There are different errors you might encounter at this stage, so you need to take note of the error message and at which stage it happened.

Here are some of the errors you may encounter during the installation process.

Stuck at Setting Up Screen

When you’ve been stuck with the Setting up your Mac message for several hours or you encounter the dreaded spinning wheel, the best way to deal with this is to restart your device. Press the power button to shut down your Mac, then press it again to reboot.

Storage Space Problems

If you failed to optimize your storage space before the installation, you might come across errors related to insufficient storage space. You might see the macOS Could not be installed, the target disk is too small message or the There is not enough free space on the selected volume error.

This happens because you do not have enough space on your Mac. Free up some storage first before proceeding with the installation. You might need around 20GB to 25GB of space for macOS Catalina to run efficiently on your Mac.

Network Access Error

If you see a Code=551 error anytime during the installation process, you need to check your network settings. This error happens to devices with overactive firewall or those installed with third-party security software, such as VPN and antivirus. If this happens, disable this software first before trying to reinstall macOS Catalina.

Installation Doesn’t Complete

Sometimes, your Mac gets stuck with the x minutes remaining screen during the installation. When you encounter this problem, click the X button to exit the installation process and check your console logs. It is possible that your user account is corrupted, preventing your system from completing the installation process.

The only way to deal with this is to create another admin user account and install macOS Catalina using that account.

Mac Fails to Start After Update

You might think that everything is over once you finish the installation process and your Mac restarts. But sometimes, errors can still happen even after the installation has been completed. Some users reported getting stuck with a black screen, while others encounter the spinning wheel during the restart following the update.

This error is usually caused by incompatible or corrupted kext files. Kext or Kernel Extension files are the drivers for macOS. To check whether kext files are causing the error, move all of them out of your Extensions folder before rebooting your Mac.

To move your kext files, follow the steps below:

Upgrade Mac Pro 5 1 To Catalina 2020

1. Boot your Mac into Safe Mode by holding down the Shift key until you see the Apple logo.
2. Open Terminal under the Utilities folder, then copy-paste the following command:

mkdir ~/Extensions-Backup && sudo mv /Library/Extensions/* ~/Extensions-Backup/

Mac Pro 5 1 Catalina Boot Camp

Once done, restart your Mac in normal mode and see if it goes through.

If All Else Fails, Do a Fresh Install.

If you’re still having issues despite following the guide above, you may need to do a fresh install of macOS Catalina. To do this:

1. Shut down your Mac.
2. Press Power + Command + R keys to bring up the macOS Utilities screen .
3. Click Reinstall macOS.
4. Select Disk Utility > Erase HDD.
5. Install the macOS Catalina from here.

Remember that erasing your HDD will delete all of your files and settings, so make sure you have a backup before doing a fresh install. This should hopefully take care of common macOS Catalina installation problems.