[Guide] Success! Install 10.8 on old unsupported Mac

[forum1980]

You have the same problem that everyone. No graphic acceleration for GMA950. Following the steps on pos #22 you can install ML, but is unusable (there ara some troubles). I recommend you install it on a partition to test.

thanks

 

[llaszlo]

I found this on google:
OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion for officially unsupported Macs - iUTA M

I tried install this but installation failed.
Has anyone tried?

 

[Frixo Cool]

Please advise!

I have unsupported Mac Pro 2,1 (8-core 3GHz) with Radeon HD 5870 and 16 GB RAM. BTW superb machine, still way faster than any iMac.

On work I have newer supported Mac Pro with Mountain Lion on it and I can switch disks as I wish.

What is the best way to hack ML so I can use it on my older Mac Pro?

 

[tangles]

Would a hex hack fix the memory issues?

Hi,

I've got an Xserve 2006 up and running 64bit no probs that has 2 x 4GB sticks of RAM.

But, I noticed this in the logs at every boot:

kernel[0]: EFI32: kernel virtual space limited to 4GB

Wasn't really an issue until I asked the kernel and some kexts to starting doing some real work!

I installed macZFS to do some tests...
Built my pool using 3 disks which was all good, and went to test it by duplicating a few files and wham! Xserve KPs and restarts!
macZFS is coded to protect data-integrity-on-disk at all costs, therefore a KP/halt if something goes wrong is expected behaviour with ZFS.

This is repeatable on every occasion I test, and testing with my HacPro performs as expected... i.e. no KPs

So, I went hunting for this string on the web and I found:

http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/osfmk/x86_64/pmap.c?v=xnu-1699.24.8#L476

which has the very string that is dumped out to the logs when booting.

So, for anyone far more knowledgeable in these matters than me:

Am I correct in my understanding that even though the kernel is booting 64bit mode, it's hooks with the EFI32 firmware are setting the 64 bit kernel to run with 32 bit parameters?

If this is the case that a 64bit kernel is running with some 32bit parameters set at boot time, does this mean a hex-editor effort with perhaps the boot.efi or mach_kernel files could redress my assumption/understanding above?

Cheers,

R.

 

[Baytriple]

Please advise!

I have unsupported Mac Pro 2,1 (8-core 3GHz) with Radeon HD 5870 and 16 GB RAM. BTW superb machine, still way faster than any iMac.

On work I have newer supported Mac Pro with Mountain Lion on it and I can switch disks as I wish.

What is the best way to hack ML so I can use it on my older Mac Pro?

I have the same machine but 12 Ram.
I have posted a link before but of you google how to install ml on a 1,1 mac pro you should find a post from a guy called jabawoki or some other spelling.

 

[z00n1e]

I found this on google:
OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion for officially unsupported Macs - iUTA M

I tried install this but installation failed.
Has anyone tried?

I have not tried it, but i think it is supposed to fail. When booting, hold alt and select your hard drive and it should boot to Mountain lion.

 

[ZeRoLiMiT]

I have not tried it, but i think it is supposed to fail. When booting, hold alt and select your hard drive and it should boot to Mountain lion.

have you tried it?I am in the process of getting this to try it on my macbook

 

[hackerwayne]

Hey guys, im back.. Quite bz for the past few weeks. Okies.. let me clear up some stuffs.
1.

Well Ive done all that I can, so I'll wait it out until we have a workaround, but seriously, folks, what would it take to take Dictation, Notification Center, Notes, and Messages (heck, we can use the beta dmg for that!) and transplant them into Lion? I think it can be done.

Ans: Nope! Unless you can get gatekeeper/new sandbox system to work in Lion.

----------
2.

Hi folx.

I tried the 2 patched boot.efi from Post #22 on my MacPro 1,1. All works (the sound too ... without any Patch). But not the Gfx-Card. I have a flashed HD4890 which works with the Exotic-Gfx-Driver normally.

I can´t see the desktop. My 2 Screens are grey. It detects the 2nd Monitor well ... but no Desktop. Any advice?

I don´t have the problems if I boot with Chameleon.

OpenGL 4 doesn't work in Lion. Youre out of luck!

----------

I have some troubles with ML on MacPro 1,1.

I followed #22 but when i try to install, it stuck on grey screen.

Here's the pic of verbose
Image

Thx in advance.

Sorry for my english, i'm spanish! xD

As stated on post 22, Nvidia 7300GT is not supported

----------

Hi guys! Very nice work!
Can anyone upload an image of installiation usb?
I have tried to create it itself but nothing worked.

Thank you in advance!

Mountain Lion is a copyright item, posting a modded img/iso/dmg = piracy and piracy is not allowed on this forum.

----------

And why it´s working with Chameleon?

Chameleon has bootflags such as NVenabler=yes. You cant do that on stock system

----------

Hello everybody and hackers

i have a bad news for you

ML works very well in my 2008 Macbook, but there are two problems:

1) Every video and animation based in Flash always prick many times.
2) Keyonte doesn't show normally the slides. It gave a warning:

"Your computer may not have enough video random-access memory (VRAM) to play the slideshow at the current screen resolution.

Try changing your colors from millions to thousands, or choosing a lower screen resolution in the Displays pane of System Preferences."

How do I hack this solution?

It's very dangerous to open Launchpad because it gives more lag and you have to restart. For searching for an app, use Spotlight or Application folder on the Dock. It's safe to use Mission Control.

X3100 does not support OpenGL4 and OpenGL 4 is the primary OpenGL in ML, unless we could get OpenGL 3 to work, those issues wont b fixed

----------

Hello,

I'v got a Mac*Pro 1.1 (Processeur 2 x 2,66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon,
Mémoire 6 Go 667 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM, Graphisme ATI Radeon HD 4890 1024 MB).

Can I get some KEXT for ATI Radeon HD 4890, please?

Thinks

Is your 4890 a PC flashed card? If yes, it wont work.

----------

DP1 was the only one that supported 32bit drivers

Even DP 1's 32bit kernel isnt complete. Its crippled

----------

Question. What part of an app tells it which OS it is compatable with? I opened up the Applications folder with OS 10.7 Lion, and of course, the Notes app has the no smoking sign over it, and it says it's not compatable with Lion, which makes sense. But I figure all it needs is to either think it is compatable with Lion, or think it's running Mountain Lion, and that we might be able to spoof that with editing a bit of its code. I don't think it's that hard. I'll look into it, myself, but my knowledge of OS X code is limited so I don't know exactly where to look.

So why am I posting this here?

I honestly think that the future of this thread should trend toward trying to migrate the features of our legally owned copies of 10.8 to Lion. Some clever coding could do this easily. But legally, you have to do it from your legally owned copy. If this suggestion is against macrumors policy, feel free to edit it or delete it. But this would overcome out no QE/CI issues, and everything else, because Lion works, and putting the apps in would be Awesome. Cause they'd work.

Not gonna happen unless one can get Gatekeeper/Sandbox to run in Lion.

----------

It might not be as simple as you think. Some of those apps probably use frameworks not present in Lion. Especially anything having to do with iCloud syncing which is much improved in ML.

Not just framework, Lion doesn't have the sandbox that ML uses.

----------

I need help for installing ML on a middle 2008 imac, (Model Code: a1145), i followed the step by step guide on the topic #22 but when i insert the thumb drive in the iMac and start from it, the installation of mountain lion dosen't appear and after some minutes when i give the apple logo with a rounding circle below, on the screen appear the stop cross signal and the imac after few second turn off.

where i go wrong? i followed the guide step by step!

Please Help Me!!! =(

If not mistaken, you can hack Snow Leopard DP1 to run on G4s, mainly because PPC codes are still present.

----------

I need help for installing ML on a middle 2008 imac, (Model Code: a1145), i followed the step by step guide on the topic #22 but when i insert the thumb drive in the iMac and start from it, the installation of mountain lion dosen't appear and after some minutes when i give the apple logo with a rounding circle below, on the screen appear the stop cross signal and the imac after few second turn off.

where i go wrong? i followed the guide step by step!

Please Help Me!!! =(

Mid 2008 iMac is supported by Apple, you don't have to hack it to install

----------

Originally it wouldn't even boot, i just got the no entry symbol. I put the hack in the platformsupport.plist to add the XServe2,1 as a supported machine. It booted, but the actual installer still refused to believe it was a supported model. So i cloned an existing installation of ML onto the XServes hard drive, and added the XServe2,1 model and the board number into the platformsupport.plist preference file in /System/Library/CoreServices on the newly copied installation. The machine booted perfectly. The only other thing i had to do is copy over the X1300 graphics drivers from a Lion installation and the machine is working perfectly. The only thing as i said is Remote Desktop is a bit sluggish, there may be something in the graphics drivers that isn't functioning correctly, but other than that no problems at all. In fact i'm surprised at just how well it runs. Just don't expect to be using any high graphics capable apps on it! Which most people wouldn't. In fact most people who use XServes don't even plug monitors into them!

Opps, forgot to include xserves values into those plist files. Will update the packages

----------

Stupid question, but does the DP have some drawback compared to the retail version? Cause, if the GMA950 driver issue can be solved then theoretically ML can also boot on the Classic Macbook (2006 MB1.1), can't it? Considering it has a 32 bit kernel.

Or am i talking out of my arse on this one? Which may very well be since i haven't actually owned a "modern" intel mac until last Saturday.

It would not and never work because even EFI is 32bit, its crippled. But the main problem is that Finder is in 64bit. So, yes, you *can* sort of install but without Finder, Activity Monitor, Safari, Launchd and Dock. All you will see is the ML wallpaper

----------

I know that has been answered already, but just to make it clear... what are you talking about??

The DPs are the Developer Previews. i.e. BETA version of the OS. ML DP1 has been the only ML version with the 32 bits kernel. You wanna install that one? Sure you can. Probably it would work on a Core Duo 32 bits CPU as well. I mean.. when it works. It is obviously bugged, not definitive, the API may be different, some applications may/will crash. It would be just a call for troubles.

Erm.. true, but he most probably woudnt be able to boot it cuz Finder & all other crucial apps are in 64bit

----------

I like making experiments, too....but.....be serious....I'm sure 10.5 on a G3 makes no sense for serious work since Leopard is already slow on a G4....I myself have an iBook G4 1,2 Ghz 768 MB RAM and it's really slow....pretty much unusable.... you can't even watch 360p YouTube vids without using Mactubes or something like that.....

Unlike 10.8 on C2D-Mac(Book)s, it runs much smoother than the officialy supported Leopard on a G4 with upgraded RAM (have both here )....

regards

Its still barely usable in my opinion, C2D whitebooks 06~08 already struggles to run Lion with 2GB ram. I mean about 6 or 7 tabs in Safari and iTunes open enough to jam up the Mac.

----------

Leopard does not work on a G3, but it does run on a Powerbook G3, i my case a Pismo, with a Daystar 550mhz G4 upgrade. Its somewhat usable.

Not mistaken G3s does work on Leopard DP1

----------

What does this actually mean? What do I need QE/CI for?

So basically: What can I not do if I don't have QE/CI?

Er.. less technical explanation will be

1. No launchpad
2. No animation
3. No flash
4. trouble dragging finder window around
5. Almost everything depends on it. OpenGL/OpenCL etc.
6. In other words, its exactly like Windows without graphics driver

technical explanation

QE = Quartz Extreme and Quartz Extreme is introduced in OS 10.2 back in 200x. Quartz Extreme, no central processor (CPU) cycles are utilized for scene composition. Quartz Compositor runs using the graphics processor (GPU) by encapsulating each rendered backing store in an OpenGL texture map or surface. The GPU then composes the surfaces and maps to provide the final image, which is delivered to its frame buffer.

 

[hackerwayne]

Please advise!

I have unsupported Mac Pro 2,1 (8-core 3GHz) with Radeon HD 5870 and 16 GB RAM. BTW superb machine, still way faster than any iMac.

On work I have newer supported Mac Pro with Mountain Lion on it and I can switch disks as I wish.

What is the best way to hack ML so I can use it on my older Mac Pro?

best guide is to use Chameleon because you have 16GB ram. I coudnt get my boot.efi to boot with anything more then 8GB. If you want to use #22 then you cant use 16GB ram

----------

Hi,

I've got an Xserve 2006 up and running 64bit no probs that has 2 x 4GB sticks of RAM.

But, I noticed this in the logs at every boot:

kernel[0]: EFI32: kernel virtual space limited to 4GB

Wasn't really an issue until I asked the kernel and some kexts to starting doing some real work!

I installed macZFS to do some tests...
Built my pool using 3 disks which was all good, and went to test it by duplicating a few files and wham! Xserve KPs and restarts!
macZFS is coded to protect data-integrity-on-disk at all costs, therefore a KP/halt if something goes wrong is expected behaviour with ZFS.

This is repeatable on every occasion I test, and testing with my HacPro performs as expected... i.e. no KPs

So, I went hunting for this string on the web and I found:

http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/osfmk/x86_64/pmap.c?v=xnu-1699.24.8#L476

which has the very string that is dumped out to the logs when booting.

So, for anyone far more knowledgeable in these matters than me:

Am I correct in my understanding that even though the kernel is booting 64bit mode, it's hooks with the EFI32 firmware are setting the 64 bit kernel to run with 32 bit parameters?

If this is the case that a 64bit kernel is running with some 32bit parameters set at boot time, does this mean a hex-editor effort with perhaps the boot.efi or mach_kernel files could redress my assumption/understanding above?

Cheers,

R.

Well.. to explain a lil more detail on how i modify the EFI file. Its basically a ML EFI shell but with Lion 32 bit code. Why? Because your xserve simply doesnt support 64bit boot mode/EFI64. So why use ML efi? Because theres checks in the EFI, if you use a stock lion efi file, it will result in a KP because the dependencies are not there, but those dependencies are actually 32 bit so EFI32 will load it fine. So yes, this 64bit kernel is using 100% 32bit parameters with mountain lions 32bit dependencies. If apple changed to 64bit dependencies, this guide won't be possible anymore. I suggest if you really need 64bit parameters, try chameleon method. And btw, Power Management kext, AHCI, keyboard, trackpad and all system kexts are still in 32 bit except graphics card and sound, for whatever the reason lol..

 

[tangles]

about xserve's EFI...

My understanding is that all Intel Xserves don't have the full EFI capabilities like iMacs, MacPros etc etc, hence I can't use bootcamp on an Xserve – they're missing BIOS emulation, so I'd expect that Chameleon is a no go as well?

Does this mean I should look at EFI32 booting GRUB2's bootloader, then have GRUB2 boot the Xserve into ML? to get full 64bit operation?

No idea if that's even possible...

Thanx for the reply Wayne,

R.

 

[milo]

Unless you can get gatekeeper/new sandbox system to work in Lion.

Isn't Gatekeeper in 10.7.5 (and in earlier versions but without visible GUI for it)?

 

[llaszlo]

I have not tried it, but i think it is supposed to fail. When booting, hold alt and select your hard drive and it should boot to Mountain lion.

It's not fail.
Boot is good and installation started, but stopped about 95%.

 

[pgrif]

It works!

I downloaded iUTAMacinhackV10b2.dmg this weekend and got it to work.
My computer is a MacBook 3.1 with the 3100 graphic chip.
The only thing so far that doesn't work is Youtube on Google Chrome.
I now have Lion, Mountain Lion, and Windows on one machine.

 

[ZeRoLiMiT]

I downloaded iUTAMacinhackV10b2.dmg this weekend and got it to work.
My computer is a MacBook 3.1 with the 3100 graphic chip.
The only thing so far that doesn't work is Youtube on Google Chrome.
I now have Lion, Mountain Lion, and Windows on one machine.

how is it running? slow, smooth? fast? or the same?

 

[pgrif]

Latest try.

ML works great, it's fast and responsive. I'm planning on using it instead of Lion except I doubt that I'll need the dictation.

 

[hackerwayne]

My understanding is that all Intel Xserves don't have the full EFI capabilities like iMacs, MacPros etc etc, hence I can't use bootcamp on an Xserve – they're missing BIOS emulation, so I'd expect that Chameleon is a no go as well?

Does this mean I should look at EFI32 booting GRUB2's bootloader, then have GRUB2 boot the Xserve into ML? to get full 64bit operation?

No idea if that's even possible...

Thanx for the reply Wayne,

R.

Try rEFIt.

 

[hackerwayne]

Update Sept, 6th 4:34am:

Added list of supported flashed PC graphics card for Mac Pro. Incomplete!

 

[hackerwayne]

Update: 6 sept 2012 6.25am

Added bunch of pictures to post #22 to assist non native english speakers to install

 

[C-r1s]

ML works great, it's fast and responsive. I'm planning on using it instead of Lion except I doubt that I'll need the dictation.

Do you have some problem with your iCloud account?
In case of some issue, do you know the way to fix it?
Thanks a lot

 

[pgrif]

iCloud seems to work fine, I really don't use it so I can't tell for sure.

 

[antony34]

iCloud seems to work fine, I really don't use it so I can't tell for sure.

Can use iWork with no problem?

 

[hackerwayne]

Can use iWork with no problem?

Works fine for graphics card thats listed on post #1 and post #22 if yours not listed, that means it might not.

 

[alpez]

I don't believe this... Following the guide at post #22 I manage to successfully install ML in my MacBook 2,1 using the GMA 950 kexts without QE/CI support, and...

Agree, I don't feel any difference from lion lacking the gma950 kexts in mountain lion.

---------------------------------------------
MacMini 2,1 2G 329GB

Sent from Stelvio Bokföring
Stelvio Löneprogram, Bokföringsprogram http://www.ct.se

 

[Michelasso]

Strange things happened to me with 10.8.2 12C35 combo. First of all i checked with pacifist if there is a new boot.efi- but nothing in coreservices folder. So i installed it over my 10,8,2 12C31. You can imagine what happened. ML c35 didn´t boot. So i started Lion and found in the ML 10.8.2 a new boot.efi file. But i couldn´t delete it with root rights. Cocktail was able to delete this boot.efi file and i replaced it with the one in 10,8,2 12C31. Next boot was ok. so i have C35 on my MB 3.1.

The new boot.efi is in /usr/standalone/i386. I think it gets copied over the Coreservices folder. I wonder if Apple added it again to block block the unsupported Macs. Anyway, to replace it one just needs to "unlock" it with the Terminal command:

sudo chflags nouchg /Volumes/<Mountain\ Lion volume>/System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi

and then copy the patched one over.

 

[hackerwayne]

The new boot.efi is in /usr/standalone/i386. I think it gets copied over the Coreservices folder. I wonder if Apple added it again to block block the unsupported Macs. Anyway, to replace it one just needs to "unlock" it with the Terminal command:

sudo chflags nouchg /Volumes/<Mountain\ Lion volume>/System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi

and then copy the patched one over.

Thanks, will add this to Post#1 and Post#22.