And another follow-up mail today, this one from a reader that had originally said his quad-core CPU upgraded 2006 Mac Pro's KP's in Lion were also fixed with the 2,1 bootrom, but later reported they'd come back after switching to an OCZ SSD boot drive:
"Following up with the Mac Pro upgrade from 1,1 to 2,1 bootrom.
My problem from before most likely was from a defective SSD from OCZ. (240 GB VERTEX 3 OEM.) I got it RMA'ed and they finally acknowledged a bug in the firmware that causes the drive to VANISH from the SATA controller while in operation. Of course, this will crash your computer (it crashed both my Dell and my Mac).
After I got it back with the new SSD firmware, I've had no problems since. Now running 2 x Xeon 5355 CPUs on 2,1 Firmware with the SSD as the boot drive running 10.7.2. Also running hacked 5770. So far, I've experienced ZERO problems. Lion + SSD is super fast.
I realized that the group of people who upgrade their CPUs are probably more likely to get upgrade graphics cards and SSDs to breathe new life into their aging Mac Pros. I'm no exception and I expect there's quite a number with the particular SSD firmware problem. I'm not saying that is the only cause, but my problems have vanished... for now!
The difficulty with troubleshooting this is that Lion, a newly introduced Vertex 3 SSD drive, and cheap quad core upgrades were all done at the same time so it was hard to determine which was causing the problems. Likewise, a firmware fix for the SSD and netkas's 2,1 firmware enabler came out almost at the same time so that also makes isolating the solution equally difficult.
My advice is to check to make sure you have the latest firmware on all your hardware!
(asked for info on the SSD firmware versions)
The latest OCZ firmware for the Vertex 3 line is 2.15. I had 2.13, which still exhibited the defects. More info here
-Khai"
