macOS 10.14 Mojave on Unsupported Macs Thread

[segfaultdotorg]

Per release notes:
"Graphics anomalies: Currently, pre-metal video cards used in Mojave will produce a weird darkish grey Menu Bar and Finder sidebar when using the light theme. In the dark theme, however, these anomalies are not present."

Indeed. Even in the dark theme, the file open dialog in various apps will display the same anomaly. It's pretty annoying. I'm trying to decide whether to downgrade. Does anyone know if a fix is on the horizon? Thanks.

 

[IeU]

On a 8.1 MBP, was on 10.14.0, without any problems. Went for 10.14.1 today, did the steps pointed in http://dosdude1.com/mojave/

Updates

Currently, it seems the 10.14.1 update does NOT install properly on unsupported machines, and could result in an unbootable OS. If you want to install the 10.14.1 update (and are not currently running 10.14.1), perform the following steps:

- Download the latest version of Mojave Patcher
- Download the installer using the Tools menu of Mojave Patcher
- Create a patched USB installer
- Boot from that, and install 10.14.1 onto the volume containing an older release.
- Once done, apply the post-install patches, and you should now be on 10.14.1.
​

Once I booted into the USB, one thing I noticed: I had to mount my main hd drive, where the 10.14.0 install was. Only then I could choose the drive in the installation window, otherwise would tell me "not enough space under that drive to install Mojave"

The installation went on fine, i rebooted and entered again the USB and applied the patches again and forced a rebuild cache. After reboot, i get this:



After the third pic, I get the login window, where i enter my password, and after that I get more text . . .



And after like 15-30 seconds I am successfully logged in. Everything seems to be working, but the fans are full on, wasn't so under 10.14.0.

Any suggestions?
Try the install again + re-apply patches?

the update went through:



And some diagnostics:



Any help/suggestion on finding and fixing the issue would be welcomed!

 

[LuisN]

Per release notes:
"Graphics anomalies: Currently, pre-metal video cards used in Mojave will produce a weird darkish grey Menu Bar and Finder sidebar when using the light theme. In the dark theme, however, these anomalies are not present."

Indeed. Even in the dark theme, the file open dialog in various apps will display the same anomaly. It's pretty annoying. I'm trying to decide whether to downgrade. Does anyone know if a fix is on the horizon? Thanks.

Try this: https://github.com/SpiraMira/HybridMode-Public/releases/tag/v1.3
read the instructions

 

[dosdude1]

On a 8.1 MBP, was on 10.14.0, without any problems. Went for 10.14.1 today, did the steps pointed in http://dosdude1.com/mojave/

Updates

Currently, it seems the 10.14.1 update does NOT install properly on unsupported machines, and could result in an unbootable OS. If you want to install the 10.14.1 update (and are not currently running 10.14.1), perform the following steps:

- Download the latest version of Mojave Patcher
- Download the installer using the Tools menu of Mojave Patcher
- Create a patched USB installer
- Boot from that, and install 10.14.1 onto the volume containing an older release.
- Once done, apply the post-install patches, and you should now be on 10.14.1.
​

Once I booted into the USB, one thing I noticed: I had to mount my main hd drive, where the 10.14.0 install was. Only then I could choose the drive in the installation window, otherwise would tell me "not enough space under that drive to install Mojave"

The installation went on fine, i rebooted and entered again the USB and applied the patches again and forced a rebuild cache. After reboot, i get this:

View attachment 807719 View attachment 807720 View attachment 807721

After the third pic, I get the login window, where i enter my password, and after that I get more text . . .

View attachment 807722

And after like 15-30 seconds I am successfully logged in. Everything seems to be working, but the fans are full on, wasn't so under 10.14.0.

Any suggestions?
Try the install again + re-apply patches?

the update went through:

View attachment 807723

And some diagnostics:

View attachment 807724 View attachment 807725

Any help/suggestion on finding and fixing the issue would be welcomed!

It's probably just updating some caches and/or Spotlight indexing. Just let it sit awhile, and see if it calms down.

 

[LuisN]

It's probably just updating some caches and/or Spotlight indexing. Just let it sit awhile, and see if it calms down.

@dosdude1 it seems he has the apfs patch installed. MBP 8,1 shouldn't need it, should it?

 

[dosdude1]

@dosdude1 it seems he has the apfs patch installed. MBP 8,1 shouldn't need it, should it?

Ah, yes, you're correct. He may just not have had High Sierra installed on that system beforehand, and therefore does not have APFS-compatible system firmware.

 

[segfaultdotorg]

Try this: https://github.com/SpiraMira/HybridMode-Public/releases/tag/v1.3
read the instructions

THANK YOU, that worked beautifully!

 

[FarmerBob]

I have updated to 10.14.2 on both a Mac Mini 3,1 and a MacBook Pro 7,1 this was the easiest yet.

I have the exact two machines you have. Do you have your drives formatted in APFS? I do on my laptop and have had a Dev account for ages so that's updating on its own. If not, how are you getting the the incremental updates or even the Public Releases? I have resigned myself to the laptop will update as it will and the MacPro will have to wait for the Official releases.

I remade my Installer USB with 10.14.1 and ran in on my 10.14.0 partition and all I get is a white startup screen and no further. BUT after running the Patcher on the Recovery Partition for the first time it worked and great. Booted right up. Couldn't do much of anything with it though that would help the new 10.14.1 partition. And the first time I didn't run a backup. I'm really good an that. Just didn't. I guess I was so excited that I got a 10.14.1 Patcher!!

Any idea why I can only get to a white startup screen and no further?

Any assistance will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you . . .
. . . fb

 

[mic1903]

Edit: I realized the mistake. You are mixing up graphical acceleration and the light mode transparency glitch. Graphical acceleration is enabled by kexts (taken from 10.12 (I think) for Intel and some AMD GPUs, and taken from 10.13 and patched by me for nVidia Tesla GPUs). The light mode glitches (weird grey windows) is an unrelated problem that is caused by lack of Metal but not lack of acceleration. @pkouame and others have developed excellent patches for that.

Sorry for possibly asking a stupid question but it is very hard to find information in this 400+ pages.
I have a Mac Mini 5,2 with a Radeon HD.
Are there new patches that allow Mojave to work without the orange color bugs and with graphic acceleration or one of those? How about the graphic bugs for general pre-metal cards?
If yes may you direct me in the right direction?
Thank you so much

 

[Sam1998]

Sorry for possibly asking a stupid question but it is very hard to find information in this 400+ pages.
I have a Mac Mini 5,2 with a Radeon HD.
Are there new patches that allow Mojave to work without the orange color bugs and with graphic acceleration or one of those? How about the graphic bugs for general pre-metal cards?
If yes may you direct me in the right direction?
Thank you so much

Hi mic1903,

what I don't understand is, why only Intel and Nvidia video cards work. Is there any difference? Does anybody know what they changed about the kext, so that AMD graphics card aren't accelerated at all?

Regards

 

[gsxrq]

Try this: https://github.com/SpiraMira/HybridMode-Public/releases/tag/v1.3
read the instructions

View attachment 807729
View attachment 807730

Worked great thanks

 

[clue232]

No sound found for the internal speakers in my 2011.

I've tried a good bit of good old fashioned googling, reset a bunch of things... but now I'm suspecting this happened after an automatic update. Because just after the install of the unsupported mojave, sound worked great. bounced through a couple pages of this thread, but didn't see anything audio/sound related.

Anyone have any tips, or encounter something like this?

 

[dosdude1]

No sound found for the external speakers in my 2011.

View attachment 808036

View attachment 808037

I've tried a good bit of good old fashioned googling, reset a bunch of things... but now I'm suspecting this happened after an automatic update. Because just after the install of the unsupported mojave, sound worked great. bounced through a couple pages of this thread, but didn't see anything audio/sound related.

Anyone have any tips, or encounter something like this?

Use the Patch Updater tool to re-install the Legacy Audio Patch, then it should work normally.

 

[johnsawyercjs]

Per release notes:
"Graphics anomalies: Currently, pre-metal video cards used in Mojave will produce a weird darkish grey Menu Bar and Finder sidebar when using the light theme. In the dark theme, however, these anomalies are not present."

Indeed. Even in the dark theme, the file open dialog in various apps will display the same anomaly. It's pretty annoying. I'm trying to decide whether to downgrade. Does anyone know if a fix is on the horizon? Thanks.

Have you tried going to System Preferences > Accessibility > Display, and selecting "Reduce transparency"?

 

[ASentientBot]

Sorry for possibly asking a stupid question but it is very hard to find information in this 400+ pages.
I have a Mac Mini 5,2 with a Radeon HD.
Are there new patches that allow Mojave to work without the orange color bugs and with graphic acceleration or one of those? How about the graphic bugs for general pre-metal cards?
If yes may you direct me in the right direction?
Thank you so much

By changing display bit depth, you can fix the weird colors, but you won't get full acceleration on your AMD card. It's not going to be usable, I'd revert that machine to High Sierra if I were you.

The graphical bugs are largely fixed by @pkouame's patch, although a few things still look weird. It's in the first couple pages of "most liked" if you want to try it. I personally don't use it, but if you use light mode a lot, you should.

 

[johnsawyercjs]

I'm having a problem creating a bootable Mojave volume on a couple USB flash drives, so I can test it on my white Mid 2009 Macbook (5,2) before committing to install Mojave on top of my working High Sierra 10.3.6 installation (created using dosdude1's High Sierra Patcher).

Using dosdude1's Mojave Patcher 1.2.3, I downloaded the Mojave 10.4.1 installer, then I used the Patcher to create a patched Mojave installer on one of the volumes of a 128GB Samsung flash drive. I booted from that patched Mojave installer volume with no problems, and used it to install Mojave onto another volume on that Samsung flash drive. When the installer rebooted the Macbook, I held down the Option key to get the system picker, and selected the Mojave Patcher volume again, and had it install the patches onto the new Mojave installation. Then I booted from the new patched Mojave volume. The Apple logo appeared, with an incrementing progress bar, but after about 45 seconds, the Apple logo was replaced with a slashed circle. I tried rebooting from the patched Mojave installation again, but got the slashed circle again.

I tried several things to see if they would help. I reset PRAM/NVRAM, but that didn't help, so I removed the battery and pressed the power button for about ten seconds. That didn't help, so I rebooted from the Samsung flash drive's patched Mojave installer volume again, and reinstalled a patched Mojave on top of the installation that had failed to boot. That didn't help, so I installed a patched Mojave onto a volume on a SanDisk 128GB flash drive, but that installation failed to boot too, displaying a slashed circle about 45 seconds into the boot process. While I've had some problems in the past getting patched versions of Sierra and High Sierra to boot on the Samsung flash drive, I haven't had this problem with the SanDisk flash drive, so it looks like the problem this time isn't due to some oddness with the Samsung flash drive.

I'd rather not go straight to installing a patched Mojave on top of my Macbook's working patched High Sierra 10.3.6 installation, especially since I'm not certain that it will boot on my Macbook due to the boot issues I'm seeing with my flash drives, so does anyone have any suggestions? I may wind up backing up my Macbook's 500GB SSD (which I should do anyway), then erasing it and installing a clean patched Mojave onto the SSD, but I'd really rather do my Mojave testing by booting Mojave from a flash drive instead.

 

[ASentientBot]

I'm having a problem creating a bootable Mojave volume on a couple USB flash drives, so I can test it on my white Mid 2009 Macbook (5,2) before committing to install Mojave on top of my working High Sierra 10.3.6 installation (created using dosdude1's High Sierra Patcher).

Using dosdude1's Mojave Patcher 1.2.3, I downloaded the Mojave 10.4.1 installer, then I used the Patcher to create a patched Mojave installer on one of the volumes of a 128GB Samsung flash drive. I booted from that patched Mojave installer volume with no problems, and used it to install a patched Mojave onto another volume on that Samsung flash drive. When the installer rebooted the Macbook, I held down the Option key to get the system picker, and selected the Mojave Patcher volume again, and had it install the patches onto the new Mojave installation. Then I booted from the new patched Mojave volume. The Apple logo appeared, with an incrementing progress bar, but after about 45 seconds, the Apple logo was replaced with a slashed circle. I tried rebooting from the patched Mojave installation again, but got the slashed circle again.

I tried several things to see if they would help. I reset PRAM/NVRAM, but that didn't help, so I removed the battery and pressed the power button for about ten seconds. That didn't help, so I rebooted from the Samsung flash drive's patched Mojave installer volume again, and reinstalled a patched Mojave on top of the installation that had failed to boot. That didn't help, so I installed a patched Mojave onto a volume on a SanDisk 128GB flash drive, but that installation failed to boot too, displaying a slashed circle about 45 seconds into the boot process. While I've had some problems in the past getting patched versions of Sierra and High Sierra to boot on the Samsung flash drive, I haven't had this problem with the SanDisk flash drive, so it looks like the problem this time isn't due to some oddness with the Samsung flash drive.

I'd rather not go straight to installing a patched Mojave on top of my Macbook's working patched High Sierra 10.3.6 installation, especially since I'm not certain that it will boot on my Macbook due to the boot issues I'm seeing with my flash drives, so does anyone have any suggestions? I may wind up backing up my Macbook's 500GB SSD (which I should do anyway), then erasing it and installing a clean patched Mojave onto the SSD, but I'd really rather do my Mojave testing by booting Mojave from a flash drive instead.

A circle with a line through it can mean two things. If it shows up immediately, it means your Mac failed the compatibility check ("This version of Mac OS X is not supported on this platform") and a boot flag will bypass that. If it shows up after a while, like in your case, it means the OS failed to mount the boot volume ("still waiting for root device...").

That said, I'm not quite sure why that's happening. It's most likely because you're trying to boot from USB, and Mojave has some weirdness with old MacBooks' USB buses. Make sure you have the USB patches installed, and rebuild the prelinkedkernel.

However... booting from a flash drive will be slow as hell anyways, so why not just partition your MacBook's SSD and install to a volume? That way you won't risk screwing up your High Sierra system, but you won't have to deal with booting from an external drive. That's what I did when I was testing patches on my MB7,1.

 

[johnsawyercjs]

It's most likely because you're trying to boot from USB, and Mojave has some weirdness with old MacBooks' USB buses. Make sure you have the USB patches installed, and rebuild the prelinkedkernel.

However... booting from a flash drive will be slow as hell anyways, so why not just partition your MacBook's SSD and install to a volume? That way you won't risk screwing up your High Sierra system, but you won't have to deal with booting from an external drive. That's what I did when I was testing patches on my MB7,1.

Thanks. I used Mojave Patcher 1.2.3 to install all the patches for my Macbook5,2, including the USB patch(es). I just read some of the info in this Mojave forum about rebuilding the prelinkedkernel (I've done it before, but I needed to be reminded of the process), but I have a hunch that won't fix the USB flash drive boot problem I'm seeing, so I might try your suggestion of creating another partition on my Macbook's internal SSD, and use it as the target for installation by Mojave Patcher. I wanted to use one of my flash drives for the experiment instead, even though they boot and run much slower, because I just wanted to run Mojave for an hour or so to decide if it works well enough for me to install Mojave over my Macbook's internal SSD's High Sierra 10.13.6 installation. I've used this process before, of testing new versions of MacOS using USB flash drives prior to upgrading MacOS on the internal drive of a few Macs, and found that USB flash drives aren't too slow to use just as a test environment.

Another option I'm considering is to do a complete (and overdue) backup of my Macbook's SSD, then use Mojave Patcher to upgrade the SSD's current installation of 10.3.6 to 10.4.1, and if I don't like Mojave (and especially if that installation doesn't boot either), I can just wipe the SSD and copy the backup to it.

I figured that this boot problem is specific to my trying to boot via a USB flash drive on an older Macbook using a newer version of MacOS, rather than necessarily an issue with dosdude1's patches, but I was hopeful I could get this to work since about a year and a half ago I'd previously been able to create a properly-booting patched installation of Sierra on my SanDisk flash drive, using dosdude1's Sierra Patcher. But of course code changes in newer versions of MacOS, and maybe one of those changes no longer allows some USB flash drives to boot newer versions of MacOS on some older Macs.

 

[clue232]

Use the Patch Updater tool to re-install the Legacy Audio Patch, then it should work normally.

You sir, are a gentleman and a scholar. Thank you very much for the help. Fixed in like 3 minutes.

 

[rlayne]

I am a newb to installing on unsupported mac. So be gentle. I am attempting to install Mojave on a mac pro 3,1. I have created the usb installer per DosDude's instructions. Currently running El Capitan. I have attemted to install, however the install hangs very early in the install process. I have made multiple attempts. The mac pro is stock with the exception of 20Gb of ram. I have tried installing to an ssd on a pcie card, ssd in mac bay 2, ssd connected by usb. All hang. I have tried to install to hdd installed in bay 2. No luck. I disabled SIP. I have run the log from begining of install it is normal except it throws warning that no board id is found and then states begin install, then hang. Any ideas. I saw that i should not reset nvram. Should i reset and then disable sip again and retry? Should I create a new installer usb on a different usb drive? Possibly create the installer on a hdd partition? I did let the installer sit for 7 hrs thinking it was working, but I was wrong. I tried high sierra as well with the same result.

 

[webg3]

I am a newb to installing on unsupported mac. So be gentle. I am attempting to install Mojave on a mac pro 3,1. I have created the usb installer per DosDude's instructions. Currently running El Capitan. I have attemted to install, however the install hangs very early in the install process. I have made multiple attempts. The mac pro is stock with the exception of 20Gb of ram. I have tried installing to an ssd on a pcie card, ssd in mac bay 2, ssd connected by usb. All hang. I have tried to install to hdd installed in bay 2. No luck. I disabled SIP. I have run the log from begining of install it is normal except it throws warning that no board id is found and then states begin install, then hang. Any ideas. I saw that i should not reset nvram. Should i reset and then disable sip again and retry? Should I create a new installer usb on a different usb drive? Possibly create the installer on a hdd partition? I did let the installer sit for 7 hrs thinking it was working, but I was wrong. I tried high sierra as well with the same result.

The USB installation process on SSD on MacBookPro7.1 has taken a maximum of 15 minutes.
If it takes more than 20 minutes, be suspicious that something is wrong.
Try to create the installer again on another USB stick.

 

[rlayne]

The USB installation process on SSD on MacBookPro7.1 has taken a maximum of 15 minutes.
If it takes more than 20 minutes, be suspicious that something is wrong.
Try to create the installer again on another USB stick.

I will give that a try. Thank you.

 

[Flacko]

I will give that a try. Thank you.

Make sure the minimum size for your usb is 16GB. Also, what graphics card are you using?

 

[Apple Master]

How can you not support MacPro1,1 ???? WTF

 

[rlayne]

Make sure the minimum size for your usb is 16GB. Also, what graphics card are you using?

[doublepost=1543895330][/doublepost]

Make sure the minimum size for your usb is 16GB. Also, what graphics card are you using?

I was using the stock xt 2600. I remade the usb installer. Used different brand (sandisk) It worked like a charm. I now have Mojave installed. I added the pcie card with Samsung 860 Evo 500Gb, 1Tb he'd, a USB 3.0 4 port card, a GTX 760, and the macvidcard Wi-Fi. Running great. Hope we get nvidia web drivers soon. May order USB c card. Thank you for the help and quick response. This really breathed new life into these Macs. Still quite powerful.