macOS 10.14 Mojave on Unsupported Macs Thread

[TimothyR734]

@TimothyR734 Do your brightness controls work on your iMac8,1?

yes they do

 

[SunMac]

yes they do

Weird, mine doesn't work.. what did you do to get yours to work?

 

[pkouame]

Got it, it's for iMac's (us lonely iMac Users).

Hmm..all this talk about disabling internal GPUs. Do I need to worry if I'm on mbp 5,3?

My secondary GPU is an Nvidia GeForce 5600M. Mojave hasn't completely wiped out the OpenGL and OpenCL frameworks yet (deprecated but still present). I don't expect that to change.

 

[Wiesel™️]

 

[visberry]

Running MacPro 3.1 with Nvidia GT 120 and there are no graphics issues, which beta of Mojave are you running and what post install patches did you apply?
did you install Mojave on a clean partition/ drive or did you install it over an older OS.
Recommended to only install on clean drive/ partition.

Why do reccomrbf clean?
[doublepost=1532127408][/doublepost]Do Updates work in settings?

 

[TimothyR734]

Weird, mine doesn't work.. what did you do to get yours to work?

post install patches

 

[Luckygreek]

Hmm..all this talk about disabling internal GPUs. Do I need to worry if I'm on mbp 5,3?

My secondary GPU is an Nvidia GeForce 5600M. Mojave hasn't completely wiped out the OpenGL and OpenCL frameworks yet (deprecated but still present). I don't expect that to change.

Not so sure with MBP, here's a link. http://dosdude1.com/apps/

 

[CrunchBook]

Checking in with a successful install on my MacBook 5,2! Slight graphical artifacting on window shadows, but perfectly ignorable. APFS didn't seem to be working either. Didn't look into it, just switched back to HFS.

 

[MoHaya]

Checking in with a successful install on my MacBook 5,2! Slight graphical artifacting on window shadows, but perfectly ignorable. APFS didn't seem to be working either. Didn't look into it, just switched back to HFS.

Same situation with my 5,5 Macbook Pro, artifacting with my GeForce 9400m 256mb and APFS doesn't work, everything worked fine for the installation part but, I just got the white screen after. The APFS volume is not being detected by the maschine.
[doublepost=1532154994][/doublepost]Dose any one think the 3,1 Mac Pros have any hope with AMD GCN GPUs on Mojave now that the AMD Metal drivers require SSE 4.2, or is Nvidia the only option?

 

[TimothyR734]

dosdude1 has a utility called APFS rom patcher so you can boot APFS volumes natively but it is risky as it could brick your machine

 

[0403979]

doddude1 has a utility called APFS rom patcher so you can boot APFS volumes natively but it is risky as it could brick your machine

I don’t think it’s worth the risk. But if you have a spare machine then try it.

 

[MoHaya]

I don’t think it’s worth the risk. But if you have a spare machine then try it.

I wish I did, but I have none, hopefully some one with a spare 5,5 mbp can test it and confirm Dosdudes APFS tool is working

 

[0403979]

I wish I did, but I have none, hopefully some one with a spare 5,5 mbp can test it and confirm Dosdudes APFS tool is working

The thing is the outcome might be different for you. The patcher should work for most people but maybe you’ll be the unlucky one.

 

[MoHaya]

The thing is the outcome might be different for you. The patcher should work for most people but maybe you’ll be the unlucky one.

Oh I see, just out of curiosity how can Dosdudes APFS tool brick my machine?

 

[0403979]

Oh I see, just out of curiosity how can Dosdudes APFS tool brick my machine?

It could corrupt your EFI chip.

 

[TimothyR734]

Oh I see, just out of curiosity how can Dosdudes APFS tool brick my machine?

I used the APFS rom patcher on both my iMacs 2008 and 2009 no issues but it might be different for the MacBook I really don't know how it works but I think it works the same as if you upgrade your bios on windows machine

 

[MoHaya]

I used the APFS rom patcher on both my iMacs 2008 and 2009 no issues but it might be different for the MacBook I really don't know how it works but I think it works the same if you upgrade your bios on windows machine

I see, I ll try it on my 2008 unibody Mac book if it works on that I'll try my mbp 5,5 and update

 

[TimothyR734]

just remember it can be risky it could brick it use it at your own risk

 

[Alex-Microsmeta]

Hi @dosdude1
I have just completely reinstalled macOS Mojave beta 4 using patcher b12. Now my Macmini 2010 (macmini4,1) is very fast (before there was big vertical moving bands on screen and was slow) I think acceleration is active, but still I can only use 1024x768 resolution. Do you think is could be because I use a VGA adapter instead of HDMI connection? With Hight Sierra it works fine 1920x1080 @60 Hz.

 

[parrotgeek1]

@dosdude1

• you can put airportatheros40 in just extensions, it won't get overwritten by updates that way
• you forgot legacyplatform and legacygpu for xserve3,1
• you should put legacywifi on by default because of atheros replacement or pci cards
• I think we can switch back to no_compat_check now
• PLEASE add 10.11 trackpad pref pane for macbook5,2. I don't know why you don't want to do that

P.S. we should update all kexts from 10.13.6

 

[thestenz]

Trying to update to Public Beta 3, but software update says in cannot be verified. I already tried reinstalling the software update patch. Any ideas?

 

[parrotgeek1]

@dosdude1 please remove ui glitches from website bug list, because DP4 fixed them

also:

• you can put airportatheros40 in just extensions, it won't get overwritten by updates that way
• you forgot legacyplatform and legacygpu for xserve3,1
• you should put legacywifi on by default because of atheros replacement or pci cards
• I think we can switch back to no_compat_check now
• PLEASE add 10.11 trackpad pref pane for macbook5,2. I don't know why you don't want to do that

P.S. we should update all kexts from 10.13.6

also look at morepatchinfo.plist it's still the one from HS

 

[jackluke]

Edit: So I'm pretty sure that it's not the boot ROM that has been updated. I checked System Information on my sister's MacBook7,1 (that has never been updated past Sierra) and the Boot ROM Version is the exact same as my MacBook7,1 with Mojave. (MB71.003F.B00) So it must be that the EFI partition on the hard drive has been updated. I'm going to investigate that.

Edit 2: I... can't mount my EFI partition. What the heck? Not sure what's going on, but having a maybe-corrupt EFI partition could easily explain this.

Please don't brick your sister's laptop!

Anyway it's very weird you can't mount it, be sure that after a booted MacOS from Terminal you have tried these steps to mount hidden EFI partition:

As you already know the internal disk is ever disk0sY where Y is the partition identifier, EFI partition is ever on 1st partition.

So to mount internal EFI hidden partition:

sudo mkdir /Volumes/TEMPEFI (instead of TEMPEFI can choose any name you want except the other disks labels)

sudo mount -t msdos /dev/disk0s1 /Volumes/TEMPEFI (msdos flag is required because Microsoft developed the FAT32 used later for any UEFI partition type)


Even if you want to mount another EFI of an external MacOS USB Installer, you can, it is ever on 1st partition of diskXs1 where X is the device disk id that can be seen from the diskutil list.
In this case use a different mount point mkdir sudo mkdir /Volumes/TEMPEFI2 for example.

Then it/they will appear on Finder (with the same label), to dismount simply Eject EFI from Finder.

EFI partition is also the place where to install other boot loaders like refit/refind.


EDIT:

I do have another explanation to the twice chime startup sound, as I told to me apple ever do even a refresh of the same BOOT ROM firmware, even keeping the same version number, you could try this step to check if the double chime is due to a "corrupt" EFI partition:
simply disconnect your internal SATA HDD/SSD and any USB booting device then power on the machine, in this way you will be sure that double chime sound is due to the only "altered" EFI CHIP ROM.

 

[webg3]

@ASentientBot You're not the only one, I have the double boot chime too on my MacBook Pro 7,1. And it is exactly as you described, screen comes on, chime, screen goes off, screen comes on again, chime, load the OS.

Use plugin telemetria (S / L / UserEventPlugins) from High Sierra 10.13.5 or 10.13.6 for fix.

 

[nekton1]

The dosdude1 APFS patch for the boot rom works fine on the Mac Pro 3,1. Several people here have used it for this model (including me).
Maybe we could create a list of known good patched models?
The reason it failed on at least one other MacBook model was mis-identification of the EEPROM. dosdude 1 is working on fixing that.
The patch creates a backup .bin of the rom, patches it and writes the patched .bin back to the rom, which is where the fail occurs. So there is a backup of the original boot rom .bin file at the root of the disk.
If it goes wrong, all is not lost because there is a way of writing the original .bin back to the boot rom. You need a raspberry pi, a Pegasus clip for the SOIC8 chip and some patience.
The how to is here:
https://ghostlyhaks.com/blog/blog/hacking/18-apple-efi-bypass
The clip and cable can be got at Amazon.
[doublepost=1532171575][/doublepost]As to the theory that the boot rom is being overwritten/duplicated to cause the double ram post. I doubt it very much.
First, when a boot rom is rewritten, you'll see the much thicker boot progress bar and I don't think anyone has. Second, the HS/Mojave OSes do not have boot-rom patch code for Macs earlier than models that could run HS with APFS, so any model earlier than that (about late 2009/early 2010) cannot get an update without a lot of non-Apple effort. If your Mac is a model that never supported APFS with HS, there is no boot rom code that can be patched to it, so no double patch.
In summary, I think the double chime is due to something else, but I'm open to being proven wrong.
BTW, there is also a patch to the boot rom code for the Mac Pro 3,1, 4,1 and 5,1 that adds NVMe booting with the right card and NVMe SSD.