[Guide] Installing 10.9 Mavericks on older Macs. -HackerWayne

[gpatpandp]

Is this how you react when a mechanic fixes something that you were unable to fix on your car?

All I did was provide a solution to a problem that you deemed catastrophic. There is nothing stopping your chameleon install on a second disk from becoming corrupt and having to do the exact same thing. Being able to run Chameleon from the same drive as the OS is something that others have wanted to do, not just me. Since the thread really is all about experimenting to get Mavericks on older Macs we tested it out and found out it is possible. Again, you have brought up some issues and while you say they are irreparable, a fix has been provided. You don't seem to like that, oh well.

I have fixed my own automobiles, from rebuilding either automatic or manual transmissions as well as entire engines including pistons, sockets, gaskets/seals myself since I was 16 years old. Sorry if the proverbial "calling a spade a spade", puts a "little rain shower on your parade" your majesty

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Are you mad?

No I no longer have to drive on the 101, 405, 118 or the 5. That single aspect in itself might have saved my sanity.

 

[Hennesie2000]

I have fixed my own automobiles, from rebuilding either automatic or manual transmissions as well as entire engines including pistons, sockets, gaskets/seals myself since I was 16 years old. Sorry if the proverbial "calling a spade a spade", puts a "little rain shower on your parade" your majesty

You are being childish when a logical and SIMPLE fix is provided... end of story.

 

[wwanthony]

I tested it extensively before reporting my findings. I believe it a certainty at this juncture that will you immediately rush to defend this shoddy sloppy concept and present something/anything to the contrary that exposes it for being what it is. Make no mistake that this "bright" idea of yours is nothing more then gimmick not to be trusted nor relied upon by anyone preferring/requiring a hassle free OS X Mavericks system on their unsupported Mac Pro. No disrespect intended.

Hennesie2000's approach has been solid as a rock for me. I have done many installs and repartitioned things to get to the setup that I want. I have been upgrading drives, etc. Every time I have reinstalled either the Mavericks partition or the Chameleon partition I have followed the same principles and procedures and they have worked like a charm. I can perform them all from memory at this point.

I am an old unix guy.....this is working very well. Period.

 

[gpatpandp]

I thought MLPF used Chameleon, but I guess I am wrong. Anyway, I would wipe it, but I would like to boot Chameleon first into the Mavericks installer, then wipe it.

Maybe taking a step back might help explain matters. Within your earlier post you described the computer your attempting to do this on as a MacBook 4,1. The reason why Chameleon is a viable alternative for those of us with unsupported Mac Pro's is that the graphic cards is these machines can be swapped out to graphics that are supported within both OS X 10.8 and OS X 10.9. Chameleon then can be used to replace Apple's EFI and basically turn a unsupported Mac Pro into a supported one. Within your MacBook 4,1 your graphics are located on an inboard chip on your computers logic board and unfortunately cannot changed. So in your case using Chameleon will do you no good and Chameleon will not effectively load the outdated kext drivers for either OS X 10.8 or OS X 10.9 to operate on your MacBook 4,1.

Your options are to download and install MLPF and use a version of Mountain Lion in 32 bit mode or stick with OS X 10.7.5 Lion which I believe is supported on your machine. Within my experiences and in all honesty, the benefits of running an OS X Mountain Lion MLPF system compared to an actual OS X 10.7.5 Lion supported system are so negligible that and when considering the functionality you loose, for me it just was not worth it. "YMMV".

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Hennesie2000's approach has been solid as a rock for me. I have done many installs and repartitioned things to get to the setup that I want. I have been upgrading drives, etc. Every time I have reinstalled either the Mavericks partition or the Chameleon partition I have followed the same principles and procedures and they have worked like a charm. I can perform them all from memory at this point.

I am an old unix guy.....this is working very well. Period.

You have your take and I have my take and my experiences as I have related them. Neither take is more or less valid then the other. I would also like to put this in some perspective. Jabbawok in conjunction with netkas and several others (as he himself graciously acknowledges in his now famous blog "How I Installed Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion on my 2006 Mac Pro 1,1) are the REAL pioneers in hacking OS X for Unsupported use. This gimmick is trivial compared to that accomplishment and offers no where near the stability.

 

[wwanthony]

Maybe taking a step back might help explain matters. Within your earlier post you described the computer your attempting to do this on as a MacBook 4,1. The reason why Chameleon is a viable alternative for those of us with unsupported Mac Pro's is that the graphic cards is these machines can be swapped out to graphics that are supported within both OS X 10.8 and OS X 10.9. Chameleon then be used to replace Apple's EFI and basically turn a unsupported Mac Pro into a supported one. Within your MacBook 4,1 your graphics are located on an inboard chip on your computers logic board and unfortunately cannot changed. So in your case using Chameleon will do you no good and Chameleon will not effectively load the outdated kext drivers for either OS X 10.8 or OS X 10.9 to operate on your MacBook 4,1.

Your options are to download and install MLPF and use a version of Mountain Lion in 32 bit mode or stick with OS X 10.7.5 Lion which I believe is supported on your machine. Within my experiences and in all honesty, the benefits of running an OS X Mountain Lion MLPF system compared to an actual OS X 10.7.5 Lion supported system are so negligible that and when considering the functionality you lose, for me it just was not worth it. "YMMV".

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You have your take and I have my take and my experiences as I have related them. Neither take is more or less valid then the other.

Way too defensive. Never said your experiences are not valid. Tech works that way. Just stating for the board that the gentlemen's approach works and works well.

 

[Hennesie2000]

You have your take and I have my take and my experiences as I have related them. Neither take is more or less valid then the other. I would also like to put this in some perspective. Jabbawok in conjunction with netkas and several others (as he himself graciously acknowledges in his now famous blog "How I Installed Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion on my 2006 Mac Pro 1,1) are the REAL pioneers in hacking OS X for Unsupported use. This gimmick is pathetically trivial compared to that accomplishment.

You need to just calm down dude. No one here is trying to take credit from the work that those have provided. And, what they have done has been very valuable for many, including myself. I used Netkas' injectors for a long time when running Snow Leopard to be able to use a PC GTX285 in my Mac Pro and it worked great.

I never set out to try an one-up anyone, all I did was try something that I was interested because I didn't want to have to buy a boot drive and put it in the optical bays. It worked and has been very stable for me and others. I had to ask for help just last night and others on this thread we nice enough to help me out. With their help we got another Mac Pro 1,1 up and running Mavericks.

 

[128keaton]

Okay, so now I completely understand why Chameleon was a viable option, now, we are just waiting for MPF to be released or I might just edit the install package.

 

[ha0rex]

Screen Sharing Problem

Hey Everybody, I've successfully installed ML on a 2007 Mac Mini via MLPostFactor, very good work, thank you! It works just fine, except Screen Sharing. I would need it, but if I turn it on, and trying to connect it from another machine, I just get black screen It's working, I can move the cursor, I can see it, if watching the monitor of the Mini. But on my other machine everything is just black, so cant use this feature It's not working on my MBP with Mavericks, but also black on my iPhone. And tryed another VNC clients, but always just black, so I'm sure, that the problem is with the Mini, and its Mountain Lion. On Lion, everything just works fine.

Anybody has an idea? Thank you!

 

[tripmusic]

So I tried doing this hack a second time to make my partitions the sizes that I really needed and it went without a hitch. I can't believe how simple it is. It seemed so daunting in the beginning, reading so many posts and people doing this differently. I guess it really comes down to your set-up and whether or not you have another Mac laying around which supports Mavs to install from. I got Pro Tools 11 to run with no problems...yet. Here's a screenshot of my bootplist. Like I said, it may vary depending on what other OS's you are planning to use like Windows.

**One thing I have noticed in regards to Chameleon when it boots up... If I don't use the arrow keys to show all of my disks and select a startup disk right away, when I choose one it has a kernel panic. Otherwise, if I choose a disk to boot up with fairly quickly it boots perfectly. OK... now we just need to work on those 10.9 bugs out there

 

[Treksdot]

So I tried doing this hack a second time to make my partitions the sizes that I really needed and it went without a hitch. I can't believe how simple it is. It seemed so daunting in the beginning, reading so many posts and people doing this differently. I guess it really comes down to your set-up and whether or not you have another Mac laying around which supports Mavs to install from. I got Pro Tools 11 to run with no problems...yet. Here's a screenshot of my bootplist. Like I said, it may vary depending on what other OS's you are planning to use like Windows.

**One thing I have noticed in regards to Chameleon when it boots up... If I don't use the arrow keys to show all of my disks and select a startup disk right away, when I choose one it has a kernel panic. Otherwise, if I choose a disk to boot up with fairly quickly it boots perfectly. OK... now we just need to work on those 10.9 bugs out there

View attachment 445482

Enable the Kernel option and select mach_kernel from the drop down. Why do you bother with darkwake and the two ATI options?

 

[RV-ABZ]

.

 

[Snowshiro]

Would you then do the same for Darwin 12 up to ML 10.8.5?

He already did.

 

[tripmusic]

Enable the Kernel option and select mach_kernel from the drop down. Why do you bother with darkwake and the two ATI options?

When I checked the kernel it wouldn't boot. darkwake seemed to help with it not crashing after waking from sleep. The ATI was because my video card wasn't being read correctly.

Also... I think someone on here earlier said something about lowering the timeout setting. When I did that it crashed

 

[Treksdot]

When I checked the kernel it wouldn't boot. darkwake seemed to help with it crashing after waking from sleep. The ATI was because my video card wasn't being read correctly.

Also... I think someone on here earlier said something about lowering the timeout setting. When I did that it crashed

Post both your plist files if you wouldn't mind and I'll have a look at them. This is the stock Apple 4870 or something else? Also, please list all the other files residing in your Extras folder.

 

[tripmusic]

Post both your plist files if you wouldn't mind and I'll have a look at them. This is the stock Apple 4870 or something else? Also, please list all the other files residing in your Extras folder.

View attachment tripmusic:Chameleon files.zip

Thanks for chiming in, but just so you know I don't have any major issues as of now. I'm smooth sailing so far. Let me know if the SMBios file opens correctly...when I leave the serial# blank it reads improperly, at least when I try and boot with it blank. So these two files I put in the extras folder on the boot drive. In the modules I have Resolution.dylib and FileNVRAM.dylib and whatever themes I have. Most of the themes I was having issues with. I found one that's functional and doesn't crash. I have a flashed 4870.

 

[gpatpandp]

Way too defensive. Never said your experiences are not valid. Tech works that way. Just stating for the board that the gentlemen's approach works and works well.

Nothing epitomizes defensive behavior more then someone being so eager to rebut, that they respond to a quote within milliseconds of it originally being posted despite that very same post being edited by myself no more then 30 seconds later as was the case on several occasions with my post yesterday.

At any rate, why I endured and belabored the point as long as I did was indeed a bad decision on my part. Perhaps it was because reasonable folks like yourself are reporting a different take and therefore I was inclined to perform my own due diligence before passing final judgement. None the less, the best permanent fix/decision I have made regarding this issue is utilizing disk utilities "zeroing out" erase function and elevating myself of this headache for good. Lesson learned for sure.

 

[gpatpandp]

Nothing epitomizes defensive behavior more then someone being so eager to rebut, that they respond to a quote within milliseconds of it originally being posted despite that very same post being edited by myself no more then 30 seconds later as was the case on several occasions with my post yesterday.

At any rate, why I endured and belabored the point as long as I did was indeed a bad decision on my part. Perhaps it was because reasonable folks like yourself are reporting a different take and therefore I was inclined to perform my own due diligence before passing final judgement. None the less, the best permanent fix/decision I have made regarding this issue is utilizing disk utilities "zeroing out" erase function and elevating myself of this headache for good. Lesson learned for sure.

oops...just to clarify I would have elevated my level of frustration and anguish had I continued to belabor this point. Disk Utility + Zero Out Erase = Headache Alleviated

 

[RV-ABZ]

.

 

[YaQb]

Please Help

Do You know any way how to install Maverick on old MacBook Pro?
My spec:

 

[Treksdot]

View attachment 445518

Thanks for chiming in, but just so you know I don't have any major issues as of now. I'm smooth sailing so far. Let me know if the SMBios file opens correctly...when I leave the serial# blank it reads improperly, at least when I try and boot with it blank. So these two files I put in the extras folder on the boot drive. In the modules I have Resolution.dylib and FileNVRAM.dylib and whatever themes I have. Most of the themes I was having issues with. I found one that's functional and doesn't crash. I have a flashed 4870.

After looking over your boot plist some quick points:

1. You shouldn't need to have the AtiPorts flag set unless GraphicsEnabler isn't auto-detecting it. To verify you can remove this flag and after the next boot open up the bdmesg log in Chameleon Wizard to see if it is or not. Since you're running with a flashed 4870 are you having any issues with QE/CI?

2. The UseAtiROM flag is doing nothing for you unless you have the ROM for the card sitting in your Extras folder and you didn't mention it. This can be removed.

3. This is purely personal preference but do you need to use a theme with Chameleon? Why not just let it boot straight to Darwin?

4. I'm still not sure the darkwake flag is doing anything for you. When you say your system would crash after waking from sleep do you mean a kernel panic or the UI simply froze up? Flashed PC graphics cards have always been hit or miss when working properly with system sleep. I assume you used a tool like Zeus to add the EFI patch to the cards ROM?

Your SMBios is fine and, aside from a few key entries, purely cosmetic anyway. As you're running an actual Mac and not a hackintosh you don't need the Resolution.dylib file and there's a tweak mentioned earlier in this thread that negates the need for the FileNVRAM.dylib if you're interested. I noticed that you didn't mention the presence of a dsdt.aml file in your Extras folder; oversight or do you not have one?

 

[tjbroderick]

Chameleon & Mavericks on same Hard Drive

Even after reading the portions of this thread that describe the steps in an apparently fairly straight forward approach, when I finally did get it to work it, it seemed to only finally do so at random after repeatedly applying the same steps over and over again (i.e. installing chameleon, entering the legacy bless boot etc.). Good thing it finally worked on my fifth or sixth attempt as just for kicks, I entered the sudo bless boot command in terminal one last time and Lion is now reporting it does not support legacy boot any longer...and this in OS X Lion.

I gave this go for no real need, I just thought it would be cool if while all things being equal I could condense my system to one drive then why not. But quite honestly (and I am aware that I am in the minority here), the approach while certainly a neat trick just does't give me the impression that it should be done in this manner and I think I am better off leaving well enough alone with jabbawoks tried and true 2 hard disk set-up.

Thanks anyway though !

 

[Treksdot]

Even after reading the portions of this thread that describe the steps in an apparently fairly straight forward approach, when I finally did get it to work it, it seemed to only finally do so at random after repeatedly applying the same steps over and over again (i.e. installing chameleon, entering the legacy bless boot etc.). Good thing it finally worked on my fifth or sixth attempt as just for kicks, I entered the sudo bless boot command in terminal one last time and Lion is now reporting it does not support legacy boot any longer...and this in OS X Lion.

That only indicates that Chameleon successfully booted Lion on the 64 bit kernel. Sorry if you already knew this but it wasn't quite clear from your description.

I gave this go for no real need, I just thought it would be cool if while all things being equal I could condense my system to one drive then why not. But quite honestly (and I am aware that I am in the minority here), the approach while certainly a neat trick just does't give me the impression that it should be done in this manner and I think I am better off leaving well enough alone with jabbawoks tried and true 2 hard disk set-up.

Thanks anyway though !

While it does suck that you've given up I can understand where you're coming from. Just a week ago I was where you were, trying to get Chameleon and Mavericks to coexist on the same drive. I'd almost given up as well, pulling my hair trying to achieve what Hennesie2000 had apparently done before me. It was as if some unknown, mischievous deity had decided it was done getting its jollies when Chameleon just started working out of the blue. Curses were uttered, valuable lessons learned, all the better for it. Running Chameleon and Mavericks on a single drive is perfectly feasible and a functional option for those who don't have or want a 2 drive setup. Moral of the story: Rick Astley is never gonna give you up. (You know what this is.)

PSA: People really need to stop referring to jabbawok's Mountain Lion guide for getting Mavericks installed. They should instead utilize the more current guide from batmanofzurenarh that actually pertains to Mavericks.

 

[Hennesie2000]

Even after reading the portions of this thread that describe the steps in an apparently fairly straight forward approach, when I finally did get it to work it, it seemed to only finally do so at random after repeatedly applying the same steps over and over again (i.e. installing chameleon, entering the legacy bless boot etc.). Good thing it finally worked on my fifth or sixth attempt as just for kicks, I entered the sudo bless boot command in terminal one last time and Lion is now reporting it does not support legacy boot any longer...and this in OS X Lion.

I gave this go for no real need, I just thought it would be cool if while all things being equal I could condense my system to one drive then why not. But quite honestly (and I am aware that I am in the minority here), the approach while certainly a neat trick just does't give me the impression that it should be done in this manner and I think I am better off leaving well enough alone with jabbawoks tried and true 2 hard disk set-up.

Thanks anyway though !

If you were adding the Chameleon partition to your existing Lion drive I can say that it doesn't work every time right away. However if you are starting fresh and want to install Mavericks with 3 partitions (boot/installer/Mavericks) it works every time without a hitch. The only issue I have run into was a 4k sector problem but that is a limitation of Chameleon and can be fixed.

Treks is correct in that if terminal says legacy mode isn't supported its because you are already booting legacy mode and Lion is running the 64bit kernel. To verify just go to the System Profiler and click on software in the left column. If it's says "64bit Kernel and extensions: Yes" then you are in 64bit.

 

[tjbroderick]

If you were adding the Chameleon partition to your existing Lion drive I can say that it doesn't work every time right away. However if you are starting fresh and want to install Mavericks with 3 partitions (boot/installer/Mavericks) it works every time without a hitch. The only issue I have run into was a 4k sector problem but that is a limitation of Chameleon and can be fixed.

Treks is correct in that if terminal says legacy mode isn't supported its because you are already booting legacy mode and Lion is running the 64bit kernel. To verify just go to the System Profiler and click on software in the left column. If it's says "64bit Kernel and extensions: Yes" then you are in 64bit.

I believe that I am being misunderstood in that I did eventually get this to work. What disinterest me in applying this procedure as a permanent solution for myself is that while you (hennesie2000) have always reported this to work with absolute consistency, others including myself and even "Treksdot" describe a similar scenario where even in following the exact steps it does not work right from the get go. And while it does work eventually I am just not comfortable with the process. I also found it odd that in several previous post here (Treksdot being one) just a week ago he (and others) categorically deny even the possibility of this being a viable option and now he seems to be its biggest advocate.

For myself anyway and in reading several of viewpoints presented here, while I think its great that some have made work for them I just don't feel comfortable nor the necessity. Thanks again.

 

[tjbroderick]

PSA: People really need to stop referring to jabbawok's Mountain Lion guide for getting Mavericks installed. They should instead utilize the more current guide from batmanofzurenarh that actually pertains to Mavericks.

As I have been following Hacker Waynes forum MLPF/10.8 on Unsupported Macs for quite awhile now, I thought it of interest to note that if one scrolls back in the pages of that forum at the time that OS X 10.9 Mavericks DP1 was first released, you will see that the poster who has commented here "gpatpandp" and "batmanofzurenarh" both collaborated together on the first installs of Mavericks so the guy does know what he is talking about.