macOS 10.15 Catalina on Unsupported Macs

[pkouame]

I gotcha. Thanks.

yeah we're stuck with our cpus. Curious - how's your PSU doing with all this load? Especially since you're considering maxing this out to 32GB.

 

[Project Alice]

Is it necessary to re-create an updated installer to update to beta 3?
Software update is saying I'm on the latest release - I'm not. It's still on beta 2. I'd just prefer not to take the 3 hours of downloading\creating and installing over the slow way if I can help it.

 

[TimothyR734]

Is it necessary to re-create an updated installer to update to beta 3?
Software update is saying I'm on the latest release - I'm not. It's still on beta 2. I'd just prefer not to take the 3 hours of downloading\creating and installing over the slow way if I can help it.

if you installed PB2 its the same as dev beta 3

 

[Project Alice]

if you installed PB2 its the same as dev beta 3

Negative. Build 19A487l

 

[TimothyR734]

Negative. Build 19A487l

You might try this

 

[Project Alice]

You might try this

It still says I'm up to date.

I've had this happen on officially supported macs on official releases too. Has anyone else been able to upgrade in this matter?

 

[TimothyR734]

It still says I'm up to date.

I've had this happen on officially supported macs on official releases too. Has anyone else been able to upgrade in this matter?
View attachment 847358

from what I read in post 2503 coz software update patch is broke in Cat but you might try the link in post 2509 but be careful there might be firmware updates

 

[GSXB]

This behaviour has a reason. Mac Pro firmware have to separate what is internal and external based on two things:

• Anything where hot-swap and hot plug is a possibility, like anything connected via PCIe slots,
• SATA drives connected on the ICH10, the south bridge, native SATA ports where hot-plug and hot-swap is not possible.

PCIe drives, including SATA/SAS drives connected to additional SATA/SAS controllers, AHCI PCIe drives, SAS PCIe drives and NVMe drives are all external to the firmware because Mac Pro can eject them when not the boot drive. That's why they're external even if it's installed internally to the case. This is immutable from the firmware perspective, but you can hack the system and fool macOS with apps like Innie.

So is innie and lilu compatible with Catalina ?

 

[tsialex]

So is innie and lilu compatible with Catalina ?

Nope.

 

[GSXB]

Nope.

Does it need to be update to run on Catalina ?

 

[tsialex]

Does it need to be update to run on Catalina ?

You should ask the authors directly, but I bet that support will come after the GM.

 

[iMac-Oldschool]

You might try this

Tried this on an iMac8,1 that was already running beta 19A501i.

The installation reported that "The requisition version of macOS is not available." A version number flashed up on the screen before it was covered by the error message. It was too quick to read.

I'm more interested in the remaining apps that are not yet working, such as Photos, than in pursuing any particular beta version and will not take this any further.

 

[jackluke]

from what I read in post 2503 coz software update patch is broke in Cat but you might try the link in post 2509 but be careful there might be firmware updates

If I find a valid method will try to force an OTA update through terminal but after fetched the correct macOSUpdate.pkg for the productID from a supported Mac, I guess at this stage Delta/Combo updates are the same, but I am still on Beta 2 and maybe wait if today or next days they release the Beta 4 for other tests.

Meanwhile, not so useful, but in trying reusing the Mojave /usr/sbin/softwareupdate , I noticed a dependency and discovered that macOS "Software Update" has its own Privateframework: SoftwareUpdate.framework

 

[Louis Vox]

Sorry if the answer has already been posted, please can you direct me to it:

I have a BCM943602CDP card which I installed last year in my Mac Pro 5,1 supporting BT4.2 and 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac. However I have no wifi recognised and BT Handoff and Instant Hotspot = No. I used the dosdude1 installation, have tried toggling WiFi fixes in the post install. Any ideas?

 

[jackluke]

Sorry if the answer has already been posted, please can you direct me to it:

I have a BCM943602CDP card which I installed last year in my Mac Pro 5,1 supporting BT4.2 and 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac. However I have no wifi recognised and BT Handoff and Instant Hotspot = No. I used the dosdude1 installation, have tried toggling WiFi fixes in the post install. Any ideas?

I guess you have to use all these from Catalina (or Mojave) stock:
IO80211Family.kext, IO80211FamilyV2.kext, corecapture.kext, IOBluetoothFamily.kext and IOBluetoothHIDDriver.kext

but replace them properly with chown/chmod/kextcache.

 

[Louis Vox]

I guess you have to use all these from Catalina (or Mojave) stock:
IO80211Family.kext, IO80211FamilyV2.kext, corecapture.kext, IOBluetoothFamily.kext and IOBluetoothHIDDriver.kext

Thanks

 

[hvds]

Successful installation on my MBP5,2 (MBP5,2 17" 2.8GHz mid 2009, 8GB, APFS ROM patch applied).

Cloned with CCC the very stable 10.14.5 from my internal SSD to an SSD on USB (Samsung 840 500GB).
Used dosdude's Catalina patcher 1.0b7 to download latest Catalina (10.15.0b3, version 15.0.17) and prepare a USB installer with it. Used this to install Catalina on the external SSD.
Running with the 9600 GPU all the time.

Success with no extra manual steps other than rebooting twice (to the installer on the external SSD to let it complete its work, then to Catalina on the external SSD). All user data, settings etc in place!

Amazing how easy that was for me average user. I'm very grateful to dosdude and all contributors.

(as reported elsewhere in this thread Photos keeps crashing with an illegal instruction, after having converted the existing photos library. This is about the only thing which keeps me from using Catalina more regularly for now. But no KPs, no other problems observed in the first 24h of running).

 

[Starplayr]

VT-x is enabled by default on any Mac with a CPU that supports it.

According to 3 sources that I read. Apple turned it off in the Mac Pro 2008's EFI. Apple released an EFI Firmware update for the 2008 that is supposed to fix it. I don't think I can install it because of the APFS FW update.

I was able to get MSR Magic to compile on Mac. I also found a msr.kext that can be loaded manually.

I had to make a slight modification to the msr device path in MSR Magic, recompiled and ran it.

It's saying it locked ON.

yeah we're stuck with our cpus. Curious - how's your PSU doing with all this load? Especially since you're considering maxing this out to 32GB.

I currently have 48GB. Max is 64GB with eight cores. I order the max with all matching sets. I will be selling off my 48GB in two banks, one is a 32 bank of 8gb each and another is a 16 bank of 4gb each. Zero power issues. Most of my drives are SSD. I only have to physical hard drives and one SuperDrive install.

My laser is flaky but I have two other Apple SuperDrives that I can fallback to. It might also be related to dust inside. Gonna air it out.

I am maxing our my iMac 12,1 to 32 GBs.

Most Macs can double the RAM to apple’s Specs.

 

[GSXB]

You should ask the authors directly, but I bet that support will come after the GM.

I’ve been given an option by the author regarding adding lilu and innie to my boot arguments like so
-lilubeta -inniebeta
I’ll post my results later

 

[jackluke]

According to 3 sources that I read. Apple turned it off in the Mac Pro 2008's EFI. Apple released an EFI Firmware update for the 2008 that is supposed to fix it. I don't think I can install it because of the APFS FW update.

I was able to get MSR Magic to compile on Mac. I also found a msr.kext that can be loaded manually.

I had to make a slight modification to the msr device path in MSR Magic, recompiled and ran it.

It's saying it locked ON.


I currently have 48GB. Max is 64GB with eight cores. Zero power issues. Most of my drives are SSD. I only have to physical hard drives drives and one SuperDrive install.

My laser is flaky but I have two other Apple SuperDrives that I can fallback to.

I am maxing our my iMac 12,1 to 32 GBs.

Most Macs can double the RAM to apple’s Specs.

It's very possible they turned off, for example on PCs often VT-x is disabled by default in BIOS/UEFI , but VT-x is easily accessible and less locked than EFI Mac.

 

[alphascorp]

Hi everybody
I finally found a little time to install Catalina on MP5,1 (yes I finally exchanged my old MP2,1 by a 5,1).
I started by formatting APFS a SSD Samsung SM951 NVMe 256GB
I then cloned my Mojave NVMe System SSD
I installed Catalina 19A487l with a USB stick prepared by @dosdude1 Patchcher v1.0b6
After 25 minutes Catalina booted like a charm and without any patches, I have sound, Wifi, Bluetooth, Map.app do not crash, I do not Drift screensaver (but I think it's normal because I I thought I read that he appeared with DP3)
After more than 2 hours of tests of all kinds it does not seem bad to me apart from the many bugs
Of course Lilu.kext integrating Innie.kext (for Mojave) does not work anymore and my 2 SSD NVMe are no longer seen as internal but as an external disk ... So I'll have to wait a bit

Next step: Attempt to make a copy of this APFS NVMe SSD under Catalina to a SSD HFS+ for my MBP5,3 (I did not patch the ROM for APFS for fear of bricking my machine)

 

[Boogey1]

Has anyone had terrible instability on a supported Mac? Once I installed Beta 3 on my early 2013 iMac, I would get constant rebooting every 5 to 10 mins. Reinstalled and it seems good for now. Currently it is running better on my Mac mini 5,1

 

[Starplayr]

It's very possible they turned off, for example on PCs often VT-x is disabled by default in BIOS/UEFI , but VT-x is easily accessible and less locked than EFI Mac.

The linux article on the 2008's says Apple picked the forth option. I can't confirm if it is turning on the Mac. I did see the msr.kext load. And the MSR Magic seemed to have run. I did some checks but could not confirm VT-x is enabled. However Snow Leopard seemed to run really good.

I may bite the bullet and install Ubuntu linux and test out QEMU more thoroughly. Foxlet has a pretty good guide; may have a better time turning on VT-x there. This is just something I started toying with. My CPU may be too old. On the 3,1 I can get VMware Fusion 8 to run and does a pretty good job. I wish I could install Apple's 2008 Firmware fix, but it's not a deal break as you mentioned. Parallels which is ok (too slow for me). If anything, I learned how to load a kext manually after boot up. Compile a linux C app on MacOS X. And I know which of my assets can run things like QEMU and Anka Build. Also have 12 portions on my Mac to test CloneToolX out natively.

I am gonna get back on cloning stuff and getting it ready for a limited beta.

 

[Starplayr]

It still says I'm up to date.

I've had this happen on officially supported macs on official releases too. Has anyone else been able to upgrade in this matter?
View attachment 847358[/QUOTiE]
That part usually needs to be patched on an unsupported Mac. Plus if you can download them there, it won’t let you unless there is a patch for it as it will say something like no updates available or this update is not for your Mac.

Since these are beta’s probably best to do a clean install and then migrate your data volume over. I don’t get too locked into any dev build and stay as agile as I can until it hits GM and then do updates sparingly.

 

[dosdude1]

The linux article on the 2008's says Apple picked the forth option. I can't confirm if it is turning on the Mac. I did see the msr.kext load. And the MSR Magic seemed to have run. I did some checks but could not confirm VT-x is enabled. However Snow Leopard seemed to run really good.

I may bite the bullet and install Ubuntu linux and test out QEMU more thoroughly. Foxlet has a pretty good guide; may have a better time turning on VT-x there. This is just something I started toying with. My CPU may be too old. On the 3,1 I can get VMware Fusion 8 to run and does a pretty good job. I wish I could install Apple's 2008 Firmware fix, but it's not a deal break as you mentioned. Parallels which is ok (too slow for me). If anything, I learned how to load a kext manually after boot up. Compile a linux C app on MacOS X. And I know which of my assets can run things like QEMU and Anka Build. Also have 12 portions on my Mac to test CloneToolX out natively.

I am gonna get back on cloning stuff and getting it ready for a limited beta.

You can actually update the firmware no problems... You'll just have to re-apply the APFS ROM Patch afterwards.