Endurance pays off – Installing Win10 and Ubuntu Studio on a MAC PRO 2,1

Endurance pays off.

I managed to get my studio-pc to work again. So i thought, while i’m at it, let’s take a chance on the mac in my mixing-suite. The task was to install a Windows 10 while keeping the old OSX as a backup and a Linux system would be sweet.

The old Mac Pros had the issue of beeing able to host 64bit Systems but having a 32bit bootloader. This caused some trouble installing the operation systems and cost me some sleepless nights while dealing with my studio-mac. I came up with the following work-around.

1.) I kept every OS on a dedicaded HD so i didn’t have to deal with UEFI Problems. When installing, i just kept one HD plugged in. Every HD therefore had its own bootloader.

2.) Win10 would not boot the install disk since it had a 64bit boot. I found a Win7 install disk, which offers a 64bit install with a 32bit boot sequence. I even didn’t need an activation key to install the OS. Running Win7 i could insert the Win10 install disk and start the installation (this time i needed an activation key). When the install process reboots i needed to remove the disk, since else the 64bit boot of the disk would hang up the boot process again. Apart from this, installation went well and i have now a Win10 System on my mac.

3.) Linux had the same 32bit boot problem. But Ubuntu offered a dedicaded ubuntu for mac install disk for ubuntu 14.10. So i installed it and then upgraded to the actual ubuntu version. After that i installed the ubuntu-studio packages and now have an up to date ubuntu-studio on my mac.

4.) Since i didn’t want to plug and unplug the HDs i installed the refind bootloader on the OSX HD to manage OS handling. Now i can choose the OS during the boot process.

everything runs sweet now and i have a still powerfull machine with up to date OS to work with.

Update:
I did the ubuntu-install without manually changing any partition but with the full encryption option. This resulted in having a boot partition with just 250MB which brought up some trouble in the upgrade process. I could have tried to move partitions around somehow to extend the space on the boot partition. Instead i did a new install (again) and manually set the boot partition to a bigger size.

So NOW i have a mac pro linux, that works well.

cheers
eighty