macOS 10.14 Mojave on Unsupported Macs Thread

[NazgulRR]

Running MacMini3,1 (late 2009) on the latest El Capitan with a DIY SSD+HDD Fusion drive.

Looking to do an in-place upgrade from El Capital 10.11.6 > Mojave 10.14.6 once it drops over the the next weeks using dosdude1's tool.

I'd like to keep the HFS+ file system on this Mac as well as the DIY SSD+HDD Fusion.

Two questions:
1) The Patcher tool works on Fusion drives, correct? Any issues I can expect on a Fusion drive?
2) I'd like to keep the Fusion setup on HFS+ for now - will the installation process keep it on HFS+ automatically or is there anything specific I should do?

Bump. Would greatly appreciate the answer. The thing that I am most confused about is whether doing an in-place upgrade Mojave converts the HFS+ to APFS on a machine that that did NOT natively support High Sierra (and therefore cannot boot APFS volumes natively). @dosdude1?

Thanks.

 

[dosdude1]

Bump. Would greatly appreciate the answer. The thing that I am most confused about is whether doing an in-place upgrade Mojave converts the HFS+ to APFS on a machine that that did NOT natively support High Sierra (and therefore cannot boot APFS volumes natively). @dosdude1?

Thanks.

Nope, Mojave Patcher will not automatically convert drives to APFS in any circumstance.

 

[NazgulRR]

Nope, Mojave Patcher will not automatically convert drives to APFS in any circumstance.

Cheers! Sounds like a safe procedure in that case as I'd prefer not to risk bricking the machine with the ROM. Hope 10.4.6 lands soon. I'll report back.

 

[tempaznx]

Just installed Mojave and the patcher to my MacBookpro 8,1 and force build cache but I'm not able to boot into Mojave. When I start with option +power key, there is not boot drive.

I've reformatted as afph and reinstalled twice but not luck. I've also installed drivers twice and still no luck.

Help please!

 

[dosdude1]

Just installed Mojave and the patcher to my MacBookpro 8,1 and force build cache but I'm not able to boot into Mojave. When I start with option +power key, there is not boot drive.

I've reformatted as afph and reinstalled twice but not luck. I've also installed drivers twice and still no luck.

Help please!

You probably don't have the latest system firmware installed. To do so, install a copy of OS X onto a macOS Extended Journaled volume, then download an run this package. Ensure your system is plugged in during this process, otherwise it won't work.

 

[tempaznx]

You probably don't have the latest system firmware installed. To do so, install a copy of OS X onto a macOS Extended Journaled volume, then download an run this package. Ensure your system is plugged in during this process, otherwise it won't work.

Thanks! Trying this now and will report back! Appreciate the quick response!

 

[tempaznx]

You probably don't have the latest system firmware installed. To do so, install a copy of OS X onto a macOS Extended Journaled volume, then download an run this package. Ensure your system is plugged in during this process, otherwise it won't work.

I ran the recovery tool and installed os lion on a small partion. I installed the "Official APFSFW update" you provided (which was just a regular app installer?).

I recreated a new partition apfs for Mojave, reinstalled, ran the patches and still no luck. The computer isn't recognizing the Mojave partion and only the lion partition.

Hrmm..

 

[dosdude1]

I ran the recovery tool and installed os lion on a small partion. I installed the "Official APFSFW update" you provided (which was just a regular app installer?).

I recreated a new partition apfs for Mojave, reinstalled, ran the patches and still no luck. The computer isn't recognizing the Mojave partion and only the lion partition.

Hrmm..

You need to be running at least El Capitan I believe for that installer to work.

 

[tempaznx]

You need to be running at least El Capitan I believe for that installer to work.

Just updated the partition to El capitan and installed the package and it works!

Thank you so much dos dude! Appreciated your help and super fast responses.

 

[DarrenNI]

Did a clean install using the patcher on an iMac 10,1 (2009) on an APFS formatted drive, ran the post-install patcher. On reboot, the progress bar gets to about 70%, the screen flashes and then just stays white - have left it sitting for about 15 minutes just in case it was really slow.

Tried force rebuilding the caches, made no difference.

Any ideas?

 

[hvds]

A question to all 17" MacBookPro5,2 early / mid-2009 owners out there (please forgive me if this has been asked before, at least I didn't find it in the 655+ preceeding pages):

Did anybody of you succeed in repairing High Sierra's and Mojave's broken instant GPU switching? By that I mean the GPU switching on the fly between the integraded nVidia GeForce 9400M and the discrete nVidia GeForce 9600M GT without logoff.

Maybe by transplanting specific kexts from macOS 10.12.6 Sierra (the last macOS version GPU switching on the fly was working on)?

Background: None of the GPU switching utilities I'm aware of - gfxCardStatus (1,2), gSwitch, gpu-switch - that used to work up to macOS 10.12.6 Sierra do work any longer under High Sierra or Mojave. At least not on the mid-2009 machines. This leads to a situation where I can't switch back to the integraded nVidia 9400M GPU of my macbookpro5,2 once an application has created a dependency to the discrete nVidia 9600M GT GPU, no matter if the responsible application is still running or not. You actually have to logout (!) for switching back to internal graphics, which is still the preferable mode for most tasks as it's generating far less heat and (therefore) fan activity. And that's really annoying.

I've contributed issue reports in both remaining GitHub repositories of gfxCardStatus (1,2) and I've also left feedback for Cody Schrank, the author of gSwitch.

However, If any of you have found a solution for the problem, I'd be more than thankful if you could report it here. Thank you!

Same model here (MBP5,2 17" 2.8GHz mid 2009, 8GB, APFS ROM patch applied, Samsung SSD 860 EVO with APFS. macOS 10.14.5 installed with 1.3.3.).
On top of the 10.14.5 installation I applied jackluke's DualGpuFix (post #15045 on pg 602) because manual GPU switching (i.e. with logout/login) had led to system instability esp. in 9400 mode. Jackluke's fix cures that.
But no GPU switching on-the-fly. I tried gfxCardStatus v2.3 which always displays the correct GPU switch status but can't switch. If I recall correctly switching works for MBP5,3 though.

 

[jackluke]

Same model here (MBP5,2 17" 2.8GHz mid 2009, 8GB, APFS ROM patch applied, Samsung SSD 860 EVO with APFS. macOS 10.14.5 installed with 1.3.3.).
On top of the 10.14.5 installation I applied jackluke's DualGpuFix (post #15045 on pg 602) because manual GPU switching (i.e. with logout/login) had led to system instability esp. in 9400 mode. Jackluke's fix cures that.
But no GPU switching on-the-fly. I tried gfxCardStatus v2.3 which always displays the correct GPU switch status but can't switch. If I recall correctly switching works for MBP5,3 though.

I guess to make working properly the Mojave DualGPU-Switching the key is to use all these from the same Sierra/HS build:

AppleGraphicsControl.kext + AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext + AppleMCCSControl.kext + IOAccelerator2D.plugin + IOAcceleratorFamily2.kext + IOGraphicsFamily.kext + IONDRVSupport.kext

+ GPUWrangler.framework (privateframework that must be only replaced from single user mode or from another macOS with APFS write access).

As the gfxcardstatus developer reported: https://gfx.io/switching.html
in some cases using a version lower than 2.2.1 may help for older machines

I think the dualGPU switching on-the-fly is only possible on 2010-2011-2012 machines (and perhaps late 2009), the older ones need to logout first.

 

[indigotheory]

Wondering if anyone could help

To cut a long story short

I installed Mojave onto an APFS formatted ssd following dosdude1 guide on a 17” 2010 MacBook Pro 6,1 and at the end of the setup it asked if I wanted to encrypt the disk, I hadn’t seen this before and the 2 boxes were checked as default, so I just pressed next...

Since then I’ve never been able to boot the disk, ive tried everything to my current knowledge and I just can’t get it to boot

Since then I replaced the drive and did a new install from the bootable usb, it booted, I ran the patch updates and unchecked the graphics switching in the system settings - energy saver, to avoid the kernel panic

Since then...
I’ve replaced the optical drive with the encrypted ‘locked’ ssd thinking I could boot from the main drive and format the disk...

I’m back at square one! It’s booting to the message you get when you get the kernel panic! Again I’ve tried whatever I can to my knowledge, internet recovery won’t even format the damn disk! I’ve tried various terminal commands and it’s starting to go beyond me

I’ve even tried a quick and dirty way of unlatching the caddy off the board and booting the system, and plugging it in halfway through! MacOS still won’t see the disk or do anything with it

Shall I write off this APFS encrypted ‘locked’ disk as a bad job or is there something else to try?

Any help would be really appreciate here, I’m really stuck, thanks

 

[TimothyR734]

The locked ssd drive since you replaced it with your optical drive might now have become the default start up drive even though its locked try booting from macOS USB patcher click on the Apple logo on the menu bar at the top then start up disk then select your drive that has macOS Mojave and see if that works

 

[indigotheory]

The locked ssd drive since you replaced it with your optical drive might now have become the default start up drive even though its locked try booting from macOS USB patcher click on the Apple logo on the menu bar at the top then start up disk then select your drive that has macOS Mojave and see if that works

I tried booting from the usb and again it gets so far through booting and throws up the message you get with the kernel panic screen,

 

[TimothyR734]

try resetting the pram press command option p and R while booting up then try the macOS Mojave USB patcher

 

[indigotheory]

try resetting the pram press command option p and R while booting up then try the macOS Mojave USB patcher

Still nothing

Whatever I do I just can’t get the usb to boot when the drive is connected, even after unlocking the disk in internet recovery mode!

I can’t even format the drive or reinstall macOS from internet recovery mode as it won’t save the files to the disk.

It’s in a right loop

I’m unsure the drive isn’t booting because either;

The FileVault lock encryption has messed up the drive

Or it’s the kernel panic from the graphics switching

Or it’s both!

 

[indigotheory]

Still nothing

Whatever I do I just can’t get the usb to boot when the drive is connected, even after unlocking the disk in internet recovery mode!

I can’t even format the drive or reinstall macOS from internet recovery mode as it won’t save the files to the disk.

It’s in a right loop

I’m unsure the drive isn’t booting because either;

The FileVault lock encryption has messed up the drive

Or it’s the kernel panic from the graphics switching

Or it’s both!

Edit!

Ive done it!!!

Booted into internet recovery mode - disk utility - show all volumes and managed to wipe the disk!

Phew, I’m learning!

 

[Sylverton76]

Can u please tell if u are having anyissues with the appstore or not , i am unable to sign in still

I've had another look at Julian Fairfax's macOS Patcher Tool. When running "patch -v" I can see that changes are made within the following folders:

/AppleInternal/Library/Extensions/
/Library/LaunchAgents/
/Library/ApplicationSupport/
/System/Library/CoreServices/
/System/Library/Extensions/
/System/Library/Frameworks/
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/
/System/Library/PrelinkedKernels/
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/
/System/Library/UserEventPlugins/
/usr/bin/
/usr/lib/

When it comes to repairing permissions, chown -R 0:0 & chmod -R 755 are run on individual kexts in S/L/E and some frameworks in the Frameworks & PrivateFrameworks folders (see list above). The next part changes the global volume owner and group for the entire drive:

chown -R 0:0 /Volumes/[HD Volume Name]/
chmod -R 755 /Volumes/[HD Volume Name]/

I assume this global change is what is causing the terminal, App Store, iCloud etc login issues? I have no idea how to reverse this as I'm a scientist, not a computer programmer. The closest I can find is this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203538 Can't say I've tried it as I manually patched the OS to get around this issue.

 

[TomH TX]

Need advice please. I am running an early 2011 MBP 15" 8,2. I have replaced the spinner with a 1TB SSD, and long ago replaced the wifi card with the updated CAX version, and have been running CAT (continuity activation tool) for several years. I have read every page of the unsupported Catalina thread, and huge portions of this one. The wealth of information in these two threads is truly amazing. Thanks to all who have done so much hard work to make this all possible. I have decided to take the plunge and install Mojave, but perhaps I have confused myself. My questions are: 1) do I need to "disable" my AMD graphics before I do the USB Mojave patch installer, or is that one of the post-install patches?; and 2) do I need to uninstall and/or then reinstall CAT after I install Mojave? I am looking into getting an upgraded "ac" wifi card for my MBP. Hopefully that will not cause any issues or problems with whatever kext files were part of CAT or get installed with Mojave. Anyway, thank you in advance. Tom

 

[@ioith]

I've had another look at Julian Fairfax's macOS Patcher Tool. When running "patch -v" I can see that changes are made within the following folders:

/AppleInternal/Library/Extensions/
/Library/LaunchAgents/
/Library/ApplicationSupport/
/System/Library/CoreServices/
/System/Library/Extensions/
/System/Library/Frameworks/
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/
/System/Library/PrelinkedKernels/
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/
/System/Library/UserEventPlugins/
/usr/bin/
/usr/lib/

When it comes to repairing permissions, chown -R 0:0 & chmod -R 755 are run on individual kexts in S/L/E and some frameworks in the Frameworks & PrivateFrameworks folders (see list above). The next part changes the global volume owner and group for the entire drive:

chown -R 0:0 /Volumes/[HD Volume Name]/
chmod -R 755 /Volumes/[HD Volume Name]/

I assume this global change is what is causing the terminal, App Store, iCloud etc login issues? I have no idea how to reverse this as I'm a scientist, not a computer programmer. The closest I can find is this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203538 Can't say I've tried it as I manually patched the OS to get around this issue.

Global changes should have impact on all applied devices?
Could this be specific to only the MB4,1 as the other (than the 4,1) macbook owners on the forum say that they have icloud working .
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203538
Did not work

 

[Sylverton76]

Global changes should have impact on all applied devices?
Could this be specific to only the MB4,1 as the other (than the 4,1) macbook owners on the forum say that they have icloud working .
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203538
Did not work

I've installed Mojave using Julian Fairfax's macOS Patcher Tool on three devices:

• Mac mini 3,1
• MacBook 4,1
• MacBook 7,1

All three were installed clean - i.e. newly formatted HDDs, no Time Machine restores etc. None are able to sign in to iCloud during the initial account setup. All machines exhibit the same issue once booted into Mojave. Both the Mac mini 3,1 and MacBook 7,1 are supported by dosdude1's Mojave Patcher Tool. I've had no issues with iCloud when using his patcher. Your iCloud issue appears to be linked to how the macOS Patcher Tool patches the system, not the fact that you're using it on an MB 4,1.

*EDIT* My three Macs listed above are unable to locate me after patching with Julian Fairfax's macOS Patcher Tool. As a result, the date & time are set to use time.apple.com and I'm given a location of Cupertino. My clock is also reset to Cupertino time. This doesn't happen with dosdude1's Mojave Patcher Tool.

 

[TimothyR734]

I have experienced not being able to sign in to my iCloud during the setup phase of macOS Mojave and Catalina using the patcher but it took a while to get signed back in .I signed out of my Apple ID made sure I kept a backup but of course I do have the 2 factor verification on then I made sure I was signed out of iCloud then signed back in my Apple ID once that was finished then it asked for my password then a code from my iPhone then my passcode then I was in then signed back into iCloud

 

[Sylverton76]

Attached is a copy of the top level folder permissions from two Macs. The one on the left is from an MB4,1 patched using Julian Fairfax's macOS Patcher Tool. The one on the right is a native Mojave install on my MBP 15,1. The first thing that jumps out is that all folders are owned by root:wheel on the left and none have group write access.

Whilst I don't currently have access to a system patched with dosdude1's Mojave Patcher Tool, I do have access to one patched with his High Sierra tool. I can confirm that the system matches my MBP 15,1 i.e. Applications, Users and cores are owned by root:admin and both Applications and cores have group write access. I'm fairly sure that the issues we are having are related to incorrect permissions being set on the drive during patching.

 

[TimothyR734]

Attached is a copy of the top level folder permissions from two Macs. The one on the left is from an MB4,1 patched using Julian Fairfax's macOS Patcher Tool. The one on the right is a native Mojave install on my MBP 15,1. The first thing that jumps out is that all folders are owned by root:wheel on the left and none have group write access.

Whilst I don't currently have access to a system patched with dosdude1's Mojave Patcher Tool, I do have access to one patched with his High Sierra tool. I can confirm that the system matches my MBP 15,1 i.e. Applications, Users and cores are owned by root:admin and both Applications and cores have group write access. I'm fairly sure that the issues we are having are related to incorrect permissions being set on the drive during patching.

maybe try running this, I use this when I install kexts but it also repairs permissions see if that changes anything