RR not recognised by Mac Pro

[Ben Langdale]

Hi, does anyone have any info on this issue?
I purchased a used Rocket from eBay and tried it in our 2 Mac Pros (2006 1.1 and 2008 3.1) installing the drivers exactly as the instructions suggest (install, shut down, wait, wait, wait, then power up and install firmware) The card does not show up in either machine, the fan spins up and the two red lights come on but other than that there's no sign of the Rocket in the system report, redcine/player or red code pref panel. The drivers install fine but the firmware update fails as it can't find the Rocket.

The seller showed me evidence of it working in his 2010 Mac Pro without any problems. So I then tried the card in a PC and it worked perfectly, it showed up straight away after the driver install and the firmware upgrade went without a hitch. Hoping this would fix the problem, I put it back into the Mac Pro with no luck. I have tried putting it in slot 1 & slot 2 (both 16x slots) and I have tried the jumper 8 reset trick which didn't work either.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated

 

[Eric Santiago]

Ben what OS are you running with the Mac Pro's?

Do you have access to any newer MPs and possibly a Thunderbolt enclosure.

Just wondering if you can test the card first.

 

[Ben Langdale]

Ben what OS are you running with the Mac Pro's?

Do you have access to any newer MPs and possibly a Thunderbolt enclosure.

Just wondering if you can test the card first.

Hi, we are running 10.10.5 Yosemite, the sellers Mac Pro was running Mavericks as far as I'm aware. I have also tried it with a clean install of Mavericks but that didn't make any difference. We don't have access to a thunderbolt enclosure or any other Mac pro's. as for testing, i have seen the rocket working in the sellers Mac Pro plus it worked perfectly in my friends PC running Windows 8.

The rocket is the only card which is not working in my Mac Pro, all other pcie cards work fine. My problem is that I can't identify the fault. The rocket works fine in other machines, the Mac Pro shows no problems but put the two together and something is going wrong

 

[Eric Santiago]

I ran into this a few times with new and old Mac Pro's.

Drove me nuts cause Ive installed the RR drivers enough times in my career to know what to do.

I recall BOMB SQUAD had me remove all LIBRARY files to start fresh.

ROCKET did not like the constant attempts without a super clean install.

I know that you've probably reformatted a drive with a fresh OS install and yes Ive had to do that too.

I blamed a specific ROCKET card for that.

Not sure if was an older card but we had issues similar on one card and never on others.

 

[Ben Langdale]

Thanks for that, it's been driving me nuts too! Did you manage to get it working with a super clean install? I will give it a try tomorrow on a totally clean HDD and see if that makes a difference

 

[Eric Santiago]

yes eventually which was brutal few days.

then the Mac Pro went wonky and had to repeat it over again.

of late we've been only using the ROCKET on the older Mac Pro's

They are not required for the nMPs.

 

[Ben Langdale]

Thanks, it's really encouraging to hear that you got it working eventually. There's hope for me yet! Lol I will keep you posted with how I get on. Any other tips you can think of?

 

[Eric Santiago]

Keep an eye on the drivers and firmware.

Maybe download another version.

They can get corrupted somehow.

 

[Ben Langdale]

Will do thanks. after a clean install was the card and driver the very first thing you installed? Even before redcine X etc?

 

[Eric Santiago]

I always to RCX first then drivers.

 

[Ben Langdale]

so I have had some success. Today I removed all HDD's, PCIe cards (except graphics) and all other peripherals. I put in a blank drive and installed a fresh version of 10.10.5. The first thing I installed was the rocket, RCX then the Rocket drivers, shut down turn on, still nothing!
Then for some reason i tried something new (on the mac pro 2008 there are 4pcie sockets, 16x, 16x, 4x, 4x) until now i have only tried the Rocket in both of the 16x slots as it needs an 8x slot or faster to function. However, I popped it into one of the 4x slots and IT WORKED! it showed up straight away and it's working well with RCX and FCPX although apparently at reduced speed. Still, it's taken a 5hr render down to just under 1hr so it's already proving its worth. Now it's working i'm going to try putting it back in the 16x slot and see if i can get it running at full speed. if not half speed is still better than nothing.

 

[Alonzo Von Threet]

I'm going to try this. Thanks. I have a MacPro with 10.10.5. My RR was fine until I upgraded from 10.6.8.