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Well I feel really silly. I had a stable running 10.13 with a metal supported gpu but I wanted to clone the drive as I move into Mojave. So I thought, oh I’ll start it up on an old hard drive running 10.8.5 and do the cloning there. After the cloning, I’ll reboot in 10.13 and head to Mojave. So I went into sys prefs and selected the old 10.8 hard drive and rebooted. That was a bad idea. Nothing. It doesn’t do anything except chime… nothing ever comes up on the monitor. 10.8 must be too old for my gpu upgrades.

With my upgraded gpu, I no longer have access to any of the apple menus that you can trigger by holding different keyboard buttons upon boot. You know the ones that allow you to choose a boot drive, target mode, etc…

I’m stuck in 10.8 and can’t get back into 10.13. Can I just remove the drive with 10.8 and restart and the Mac go into my 10.13 drive? I’ve tried holding option and trying to blind guess into the other boot drive but no luck.

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  • Can you put your old GPU back in? That will at least get your boot options back. Is this the Mac Pro 4,1? You should be able to run both graphics cards in it, just switching the display between the two, depending on which OS you boot.
    – Jan Steinman
    Commented May 29, 2022 at 4:10

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Reset to default
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Removing the 10.8.5 drive should allow the Mac to find the 10.13 one again. It might take a little longer as it hunts for it. As you can't check progress, don't press anything, just let it search. Once booted, re-select it in Startup Disk.

After that, just clone right from that drive. Apps such as Carbon Copy Cloner can clone straight from the running OS drive to make a bootable copy, including a Recovery partition. [This is much harder with current OSes, but easy up to Mojave].

As the owner of several old Mac Pros, I'd always recommend either a) only buying Mac-flashed GPUs, or b) keeping the original GPU around just for such occurrences.

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