Parallels 12 changing the boot order for a guest VM (settings list display issue)

Parallels 12 on MacOS has a curiously misleading UI issue on the VM configuration dialog, where the items in the left list are actually a scrollable list, but there’s no visual indication that tells you this:

If you click in the list to highlight an item, you can scroll the list up and down to reveal other items – in this case I was looking for the Boot Order setting, but it was displayed at the top of the list and I needed to scroll the list up to see it:

Adding an extra 16GB to my 2008 Mac Pro

I while back I wrote about my eBay purchase of a 2008 Mac Pro. Since it only came with 4GB, I purchased an additional 16GB from a vendor on eBay to bump it up to 20GB.

The 2008 Mac Pro (and I think more recent models up to but not including the current trashcan design) has two slide out trays that each take 4 sticks of 800 MHz DDR2 EEC DIMMs, up to a max of 64GB. Here’s the inside layout – the modular and easy access to every part of the insides of the machine still amazes me – it’s clear Apple put just as much thought and effort into designing the inside of the Mac Pro as they did the iconic outside. When’s the last time you opened a PC desktop case and were taken back by clean and logical layout of the inside (inside of seeing a rat’s nest of multicolored cables stuffed inside a box):

  • top left: optical drives
  • underneath: 4x 3.5″ slide out drive bays (no cables to attach to the drives – just slide out the tray, screw in the drive to the tray, then slide it back in to attach it)
  • center right: 4x PCI-e slots for graphics cards etc (two PCIe x4 slots and two PCIe 2.0 x16 slots)
  • lower left: fans
  • lower center: the 2x Xeon 2.8GHz quad core cpus
  • lower right: the two slide out RAM trays

 

Sliding out the two trays, here’s the original 4 x 1GB DIMMs spread across the two memory boards – looks like there was the original stock 2x 1GB, and then another 2x 1GBs added:

 

 

Here’s the new 4x 4GB sticks ready to insert – note the hefty heatsinks:

 

 

 

 

And here’s the newly inserted DIMMS along with the original 4. I’m not sure if this is the optimal arrangement as I’ve read you’re supposed to stripe them across the two boards in pairs, so I’ll do a bit more reading and work out if I need to re-arrange them:

 

Installing El Capitan on my 2008 Mac Pro

My 2008 Mac Pro arrived, and it’s a shiny beast of a machine 🙂  It’s sitting beside a younger relative, a 2002 Power Mac G4 Quicksilver.

It came with OS X 10.5 Leopard installed – it looked like it was a clean install, but as for any used machine, I like to do a clean install so I know what I’m starting with. Downloading OS 10.11 El Capitan from the Apple Store from my MacBook Pro, I created a bootable USB flash drive using the steps described here.

On my first attempt to install, it looked like after about 20 mins of install when it attempted to reboot for the first time, I had a blank screen and no activity. Rebooted back to the USB flash drive and started the Disk Utils, the drive checked clean and everything was good, but there wasn’t a bootable partition.

On the second attempt, I think what had happened the first time was the powersave settings had kicked in and the monitor output had turned off, but it wasn’t waking from keyboard or mouse input. The second time the screen turned back on, and the installer was stuck at ‘about a second remaining’,

but pressing Cmd-L to see the installer logs, there was a huge amount of errors scrolling by to do with TSplicedFont and Noto fonts. This seems to be a common issue with El Capitan, as described here. Ignoring the errors and waiting it out though, after about 20 mins stuck at ‘about a second remaining’ it did reboot and the installation continued as expected.

After successfully completing the install, it started up successfully, and after walking through the installation dialogs to select language preferences and create an account, I was up and running with 10.11 El Cap.

First impressions: for a 9 year old computer, this thing is pretty snappy. It’s comparable to my 2012 MacBook Pro with an i7 in responsiveness, although from only having a regular mechanical HDD, it could be faster booting and loading apps, but it’s definitely acceptable. For a desktop daily driver, it’s definitely perfectly usable. The dual Xeon 2.8GHz CPUs are holding their own, I haven’t seen anything beyond 5% to 6% CPU usage from using Chrome and browsing the web with about 20 or so tabs open. Where I think I might start to suffer though is this machine only came with 4GB RAM. With my current Chrome usage it’s eating up about 3GB so I have some to spare, but the interesting thing about these Mac Pros is the expandability – the 2008 will support 32GB per specs and 64GB unofficially. I bet if I put in 16GB or so I would get a much better experience. Time to plan the upgrades 🙂

 

MacOS start up key combinations

MacOS had a number of start up options that you can select buy holding key combinations on boot.

Most useful I’ve found are:

C = boot from removable media,  e.g. a usb flash drive

Option = show the boot menu to select which bootable partition you want to boot from