macOS 10.14 Mojave on Unsupported Macs Thread

[hvds]

Had a weird event this morning on MP3,1 with APFS and NVMe boot rom patches. Mac suddenly shutdown, not a KP but a shutdown. I'd seen this a few days ago but thought it was a one-off glitch or I had run shutdown by mistake.
I restarted and within seconds of logging-in it did the same. This happened 4 or 5 my times. I disconnected an external USB TM drive and managed to get it to stay running long enough to run DU on the boot drive. All nominal. Nothing special in Crash Reporter but there were shutdowns logged in Console at the relevant times.
I started AppZapper and removed many things that I rarely use: MalwareBytes, LockRattlr, Acrobat X Pro, iStat Menus, and a few other utilities and restarted. Then I manually removed all the mouse droppings that AppZapper had left behind in App Support, the various Libraries, Caches, Preferences, Pref panes, Launch Agents and Launch Daemons, etc., and restarted.
It seems stable again now but if it happens again, I think I'll reinstall a fresh OS from USB boot stick and repatch.

Had similar spontaneous shutdowns over the past few weeks with increasing frequency, at first only when running on battery and finally also with external power connected. I did a reset of the SMC, that helped for about a day only.
Replaced the battery two days ago, and the system is running reliably again.
The old battery had only 120 cycles but was 4 years old, and was an original Apple one, installed by an Apple shop. No idea if Mojave 10.14 draws more maximum current than previous versions or if it was just the ageing battery.
(MacBookPro5,2 mid 2009 17", APFS rom patch applied, APFS on internal (SATA) SSD. 10.14 installed with patcher version 1.2.1 end September and running fine since and again after battery replacement.)

Edit: unfortunately I need to edit this post: just had another shutdown while running on the two-days-old battery, at about 50% charge. Was using Apple mail when it happened.
I had done another reset of the SMC after the new battery was installed and fully charged.
I see the following symptom when rebooting: when pressing the power button the first time after the shutdown, the white lamp on the front of the MacBookPro flashes once (0.1s maybe) and not booting. Booting proceeds when pressing the button a second time.
I now think the shutdowns could rather be Mojave-related.
But any advice from someone more familiar with Apple power hardware is much appreciated, thanks!

 

[0403979]

The warning seems to be gone. I don't know if re-adding the links will change that.

 

[netsrot39]

Early 2009 MacBooks do not have three finger clicking, however, two finger scrolling should be functional to my knowledge.

Three finger click even works on my MacBook Late 2007 so I believe it should be possible on the 2009 as well. Do you know which kexts are for brightness and trackpad/mouse input? I could try to take those kexts from 10.13.4 and load them to see if it helps.

When I try to scroll the mouse pointer only gets bigger and seems outta control. No scrolling unfortunately. It's a real pain to always scroll with the arrow keys, to work with a dark screen and to only be able to right click when holding the control key. Any help is highly appreciated

To all the people that own a MacBook Early 2009, please let me know if I'm the only one having this problem.

Thanks!

 

[jackluke]

Three finger click even works on my MacBook Late 2007 so I believe it should be possible on the 2009 as well. Do you know which kexts are for brightness and trackpad/mouse input? I could try to take those kexts from 10.13.4 and load them to see if it helps.

When I try to scroll the mouse pointer only gets bigger and seems outta control. No scrolling unfortunately. It's a real pain to always scroll with the arrow keys, to work with a dark screen and to only be able to right click when holding the control key. Any help is highly appreciated

To all the people that own a MacBook Early 2009, please let me know if I'm the only one having this problem.

Thanks!

The kext for brightness are these: AppleBacklight.kext and AppleBacklightExpert.kext

While for the trackpad/mouse I guess many, starting from all the 5 IOUSB***.kext to these others maybe:

AppleHIDKeyboard.kext
AppleHIDMouse.kext
AppleMultitouchDriver.kext
AppleUSBMultitouch.kext
AppleUSBTopCase.kext

Some others reported that for some old macbook should be used the El Capitan trackpad prefpane.

 

[OGNerd]

Hello guys, I have an old MacBook Early 2009 on which I wanted to install Mojave. It works great under my 2 other unsupported Macs MacBook Mid 2010 and Mac Mini Early 2009. However on my MacBook Early 2009 there are some serious issues that make it rather unusable under Mojave.

These are the issues I'm experiencing running Mojave on the particular machine:

• Trackpad is detected as mouse (yes it is known) – BUT: In my case I can't scroll with two fingers, also right clicking is not working (three finger click)
• Brightness control does not work

I ran a patched version of High Sierra 10.13.4 before and all these problems mentioned above were not present. Would it help to use the kexts of this version? From 10.13.5 to the present macOS Version the trackpad and brightness persist.

I tried wiping the entire hard drive and reinstalling from scratch, however the same problems occur.

Does anybody else experience these problems on a MacBook Early 2009?

Thanks in advance for any useful information.

Two-finger Touchpad scrolling works on my mid-2009 MacBook, as well as left/right clicking.

Keyboard brightness control does not work, but this can be mitigated by Brightness Slider (available from the app store).

 

[PBear.SF]

Looks like the forum is blocking links to dosdude1's site since it's blacklisted in Google's safe browsing database right now. A few pages back, you can see that a lot of people were seeing malware warnings.

But no need to worry, it's perfectly safe. It's just that this stuff has a lot in common with malware -- it patches low-level aspects of the OS and bypasses some security features like SIP. It's no surprise that it gets flagged.

I hope this gets sorted out soon.

Yes, thank you, I know about the bogus malware scare. I was the first to report it and, also, I think, the first to try to quell the conspiracy theory that popped up blaming Apple for trying to sabotage this thread last week. But you'd think the MacRumors Forum itself (or its webmaster) would be the easiest, and first, point of misinformation for @dosdude1 to convince that the malware threats were false and persuade to stop obfuscating his links.

EDIT: Ah, the malware warnings have gone away. Oh joy, I can turn the malware blocker in Safari back on again. But how about dosdude1's links? Let's see: http://dosdude1.com/mojave/. Nope, they're still obfuscated. Darn!

 

[Maddoxx]

What's your Airport Extreme id : (0x14E4, 0x????)

from Terminal:
system_profiler SPAirPortDataType
system_profiler SPBluetoothDataType

@jackluke Thanks for all your help!

My AirPort Extreme ID is (0x14E4, 0x112).

When I type system_profiler SPBluetoothDataType in Terminal for the Bluetooth nothing is returned in Terminal.

When I generate a System Report and click on Bluetooth, nothing is returned. As a part of my iMac 8,1 upgrade, I installed a OEM MacBook Pro Air Port Card BCM94360CS dual band WIFI 11AC bluetooth. It was previously installed 6 months ago under El Capitan and it worked there fine without any problems. Could it be a driver issue? As mentioned before, my Apple Blutooth keyboard and mouse do work but they are not properly identified under Mojave System Preferences and as a result do not function properly but they do connect.

 

[jackluke]

@jackluke Thanks for all your help!

My AirPort Extreme ID is (0x14E4, 0x112).

When I type system_profiler SPBluetoothDataType in Terminal for the Bluetooth nothing is returned in Terminal.

When I generate a System Report and click on Bluetooth, nothing is returned. As a part of my iMac 8,1 upgrade, I installed a OEM MacBook Pro Air Port Card BCM94360CS dual band WIFI 11AC bluetooth. It was previously installed 6 months ago under El Capitan and it worked there fine without any problems. Could it be a driver issue? As mentioned before, my Apple Blutooth keyboard and mouse do work but they are not properly identified under Mojave System Preferences and as a result do not function properly but they do connect.

View attachment 795182

Yes, you have a modern airport all-in-one Wifi/BT 4.0 card, so I guess you have to use the untouched Mojave IO80211Family.kext, IO80211FamilyV2.kext and the untouched Mojave Bluetooth kexts to make it working. But you need especially this one IO80211Family.kext from a Mojave clean install.

 

[dosdude1]

Had similar spontaneous shutdowns over the past few weeks with increasing frequency, at first only when running on battery and finally also with external power connected. I did a reset of the SMC, that helped for about a day only.
Replaced the battery two days ago, and the system is running reliably again.
The old battery had only 120 cycles but was 4 years old, and was an original Apple one, installed by an Apple shop. No idea if Mojave 10.14 draws more maximum current than previous versions or if it was just the ageing battery.
(MacBookPro5,2 mid 2009 17", APFS rom patch applied, APFS on internal (SATA) SSD. 10.14 installed with patcher version 1.2.1 end September and running fine since and again after battery replacement.)

Edit: unfortunately I need to edit this post: just had another shutdown while running on the two-days-old battery, at about 50% charge. Was using Apple mail when it happened.
I had done another reset of the SMC after the new battery was installed and fully charged.
I see the following symptom when rebooting: when pressing the power button the first time after the shutdown, the white lamp on the front of the MacBookPro flashes once (0.1s maybe) and not booting. Booting proceeds when pressing the button a second time.
I now think the shutdowns could rather be Mojave-related.
But any advice from someone more familiar with Apple power hardware is much appreciated, thanks!

Very common hardware issue with that system, it's due to a failing capacitor on the main MCP power rail (C7771). I have a video here showing the repair of a system with that issue.

 

[ASentientBot]

Yes, thank you, I know about the bogus malware scare. I was the first to report it and, also, I think, the first to try to quell the conspiracy theory that popped up blaming Apple for trying to sabotage this thread last week. But you'd think the MacRumors Forum itself (or its webmaster) would be the easiest, and first, point of misinformation for @dosdude1 to convince that the malware threats were false and persuade to stop obfuscating his links.

EDIT: Ah, the malware warnings have gone away. Oh joy, I can turn the malware blocker in Safari back on again. But how about dosdude1's links? Let's see: http://************/mojave/. Nope, they're still obfuscated. Darn!

I'm pretty sure I was the first to mention the warning and (indirectly) the one to start the conspiracy theory. Oops... at first it only happened in Safari for me, so it was semi-reasonable to believe it was Apple's doing. But that's obviously not the case.

Sounds reasonable. The link censoring is obviously being done by MacRumors itself, so that's all that needs to be fixed now. Hopefully dosdude1 can contact them and get this sorted soon.

 

[avz]

Hello guys, I have an old MacBook Early 2009 on which I wanted to install Mojave. It works great under my 2 other unsupported Macs MacBook Mid 2010 and Mac Mini Early 2009. However on my MacBook Early 2009 there are some serious issues that make it rather unusable under Mojave.

These are the issues I'm experiencing running Mojave on the particular machine:

• Trackpad is detected as mouse (yes it is known) – BUT: In my case I can't scroll with two fingers, also right clicking is not working (three finger click)
• Brightness control does not work

I ran a patched version of High Sierra 10.13.4 before and all these problems mentioned above were not present. Would it help to use the kexts of this version? From 10.13.5 to the present macOS Version the trackpad and brightness persist.

I tried wiping the entire hard drive and reinstalling from scratch, however the same problems occur.

Does anybody else experience these problems on a MacBook Early 2009?

Thanks in advance for any useful information.

All those issues are not present on my late 2008 MacBook. Not sure what the problem might be as early 2009 MacBook should be very similar to my model.

 

[Larsvonhier]

All those issues are not present on my late 2008 MacBook. Not sure what the problem might be as early 2009 MacBook should be very similar to my model.

Those problems definitively not present here on my early-2009 MacBook (17").

 

[bc0508]

I was able to get Mojave loaded and working on Macpro 3.1 .. Has anyone noticed change in imessage I used to could right click and had option to capture section of screen now its missing.

 

[ASentientBot]

I was able to get Mojave loaded and working on Macpro 3.1 .. Has anyone noticed change in imessage I used to could right click and had option to capture section of screen now its missing.

Yeah, this has been mentioned. It's not specific to unsupported Macs, they just removed the feature. A workaround is you can Command+Shift+4 and drag the image in from your desktop.

 

[haralds]

My MacBook Air mid 2011 works ok, but App updates are stalling and the Software Update Preference panel results in a cursor spin.
Any idea of how to clear the pipes?

 

[bc0508]

Yeah, this has been mentioned. It's not specific to unsupported Macs, they just removed the feature. A workaround is you can Command+Shift+4 and drag the image in from your desktop.

Should have known it was Apple new feature.

 

[oscarodas]

To @dosdude1 my iMac 12.2 27" mid-2011, runs normally, have an unsupported card, so I would like to know what am I missing, can't find any comparisons around, the only glitch I find from time to time is when I watch movies, there is a bit of stutter for a few seconds, but apart from that all is normal. (at least to me.) I have an old card on my way Nvidia GTX660M, just paid us$102, in case I could improve my system, would I see a big difference? I'm only asking because a few owners of systems like mine have reported that their systems could barely run Mojave, thank you.

 

[dosdude1]

To @dosdude1 my iMac 12.2 27" mid-2011, runs normally, have an unsupported card, so I would like to know what am I missing, can't find any comparisons around, the only glitch I find from time to time is when I watch movies, there is a bit of stutter for a few seconds, but apart from that all is normal. (at least to me.) I have an old card on my way Nvidia GTX660M, just paid us$102, in case I could improve my system, would I see a big difference? I'm only asking because a few owners of systems like mine have reported that their systems could barely run Mojave, thank you.

Yes, you should be able to run Mojave no issues with that card.

 

[olad]

I have just noticed that on the OP, the warnings "Do not install" for the latest betas are no longer in capitals, nor in red! The warnings made some people pause (such as I), and opt to wait until there is a clear signal to install. I am guessing there have been some objections to that phrase being in red (were they in caps also?). Why, for heaven's sake? Capitalisation of words may indicate shouting, but surely there ARE situations that call for this... Bricked machines are no fun, and I, for one, would the warnings were bolded, underlined, in red and in italics (OK, that's over the top, but...). I hope there is a rethink of the automatic condemnation of emphasising with capitals and colour.

 

[VictoryHighway]

This works well for me -

https://www.crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control

Well, I just tried this and it didn't work either. Maybe I need to zap my PRAM or something?

 

[PBear.SF]

I'm pretty sure I was the first to mention the warning and (indirectly) the one to start the conspiracy theory. Oops... at first it only happened in Safari for me, so it was semi-reasonable to believe it was Apple's doing. But that's obviously not the case.

Sounds reasonable. The link censoring is obviously being done by MacRumors itself, so that's all that needs to be fixed now. Hopefully dosdude1 can contact them and get this sorted soon.

My apologies. You were the first to bring it up (#8920); mine (#8921) came next, in response to you revealing the issue. My only excuse is that my near-70-year-old memory is not as reliable as I'm used to thinking it is.

 

[DaniloGeekDude]

I have just noticed that on the OP, the warnings "Do not install" for the latest betas are no longer in capitals, nor in red! The warnings made some people pause (such as I), and opt to wait until there is a clear signal to install. I am guessing there have been some objections to that phrase being in red (were they in caps also?). Why, for heaven's sake? Capitalisation of words may indicate shouting, but surely there ARE situations that call for this... Bricked machines are no fun, and I, for one, would the warnings were bolded, underlined, in red and in italics (OK, that's over the top, but...). I hope there is a rethink of the automatic condemnation of emphasising with capitals and colour.

I fully agree with your sentiments/observation. I always want to install the latest betas for testing and development purposes. I didn't heed the warning of not installing. You could certainly try and there is always the backup or recovery options to go back to if it fails.

I have 2 unsupported macs (different models) that I tried to install the latest 10.14.1 betas. One succeeded and the other did not. I had to restore from backup for the latter.

 

[bmillz]

Hey @dosdude1, I’m getting a 27” iMac from a buddy in a few weeks. It’s a Late 2009 and it has a i7 and a Radeon HD 4850 gpu. I have two questions I hope you can help me with.
1. Do these AMD gpus still have the App Store auto play crash issue?
2. I know the Radeon HD 5xxx and 6xxx series do not have working acceleration under Mojave. My question is why do the others work? (such as the 4850 and 2600 Pro) Do they use different kexts with different requirements?

 

[dosdude1]

Hey @dosdude1, I’m getting a 27” iMac from a buddy in a few weeks. It’s a Late 2009 and it has a i7 and a Radeon HD 4850 gpu. I have two questions I hope you can help me with.
1. Do these AMD gpus still have the App Store auto play crash issue?
2. I know the Radeon HD 5xxx and 6xxx series do not have working acceleration under Mojave. My question is why do the others work? (such as the 4850 and 2600 Pro) Do they use different kexts with different requirements?

1. I'm not 100% sure on that, but potentially... You can always test on a spare partition beforehand to make sure.
2. Yes, the Radeon HD 4xxx series and older are based off a different architecture, and therefore use different drivers, which load fine in Mojave. I'm not sure why the drivers for the 5xxx and 6xxx series cards won't load.

 

[Hughmac]

Hey @dosdude1, I’m getting a 27” iMac from a buddy in a few weeks. It’s a Late 2009 and it has a i7 and a Radeon HD 4850 gpu. I have two questions I hope you can help me with.
1. Do these AMD gpus still have the App Store auto play crash issue?
2. I know the Radeon HD 5xxx and 6xxx series do not have working acceleration under Mojave. My question is why do the others work? (such as the 4850 and 2600 Pro) Do they use different kexts with different requirements?

Hello, I can confirm no problems with App Store on my mid 2010 iMac with Radeon HD 4670 graphics if it helps

Cheers

Hugh