macOS 10.15 Catalina on Unsupported Macs

[0134168]

I am very pleased with BT4 and 802.11ac. I didn't think I would notice that much of a difference, but I can have more devices on Bluetooth with lag or hiccups with my dark Magic 2 trackpad. And it switches from USB <---> BT instantly. Before I get it to work well, but it's even better now.

Now I can have my of my input devices and my Samsung BT Speaker bar all on BT.

Going from Wimpy to Hefty.

If you purchase an external antenna, the improvement is huge.

 

[jhowarth]

I don't have a V3 adapter card. Mine is flipped the WiFi and the WiFi/BT card sits on top with the cables are underneath sandwiched in between the adapter and the WiFi card. I screwed in my mini PCIe adapter card. Connected my cables from longest to shortest as I only have 1 label on the cables. I did see the J0 J1 J2 J3 on the card. And really wasn't sure where the BT was on it so I just went from longest to shortest and it works.

I made sure the WiFi card was snug. Tested it. Fired right up. No issues. I also did not need that extra USB internal power cable that I saw used on some MP5,1s. And the card's instructions said to run it without the power cable to see if it works without it.

I did check someone else's guide on the 3,1 that had my same adapter and WiFi card and he pretty much did the same thing. I could not follow the wires as my cables lost their labels except for #3. Not all the cables are the same length, so I just went from longest to shortest on my Card and both WiFi and BT4 are working without issues.

I've never seen a tear down of a MacPro that exposed the actual wifi antennas but have suspected that they are all identical.

 

[Starplayr]

I've never seen a tear down of a MacPro that exposed the actual wifi antennas but have suspected that they are all identical.

You might be right. I have also run a Mac mini without an antenna attached and it ran about the small with one.

It's cool that it has four. Does one supply power to the Bluetooth or are they all just Antennas?

I was glad I did not have to rig anything with that power thing-a-jig or USB cable-ma-bob.

Does the Mac Pro 5,1 differ if its Bluetooth setup than a 3,1?

I can say I am so happy I make the change. Other than the bus speed being slower and SSD drives not running their full speed in the drive bays, which to me still is not a bad speed compared to rotational media, I am very happy with the Mac Pro 3,1.

I put back in my original SuperDrives. Laser on those are running good and I can burn Data and watch a DVD at the same time.

I am getting back into burning to support boot CDs. There will also be boot USB drives and partitions, but looking at it from all angles.

Really the only thing it hasn't done well is virtualization. So I plan to support most OS' on it natively and forget about VMs on the box. Also VMWare has this nasty black screen bug and it's not easy to fix it because it relies on Screen Recording feature on Catalina and VMware Fusion does no always ask for permission, so it can't be set. Some users have upgraded to VMware Fusion 11, but I don't know if my box can even support it. Fusion 11 is added Metal support though, but not sure if that is only on Windows boxes with 3d Acceleration or everywhere Metal is used.

 

[jhowarth]

You might be right. I have also run a Mac mini without an antenna attached and it ran about the small with one.

It's cool that it has four. Does one supply power to the Bluetooth or are they all just Antennas?

I was glad I did not have to rig anything with that power thing-a-jig or USB cable-ma-bob.

Does the Mac Pro 5,1 differ if its Bluetooth setup than a 3,1?

I can say I am so happy I make the change. Other than the bus speed being slower and SSD drives not running their full speed in the drive bays, which to me still is not a bad speed compared to rotational media, I am very happy with the Mac Pro 3,1.

I put back in my original SuperDrives. Laser on those are running good and I can burn and watch a DVD at the same time.

I am getting back into burning to support boot CDs. There will also be boot USB drives and partitions, but looking at it from all angles.

Really the only thing it hasn't done well is virtualization. So I plan to support most OS' on it natively and forget about VMs on the box. Also VMWare has this nasty black screen bug and it's not easy to fix it because it relies on Screen Recording feature on Catalina and VMware Fusion does no always ask for permission, so it can't be set. Some users have upgraded to VMware Fusion 11, but I don't know if my box can even support it. Fusion 11 is supported to support Metal though, but not sure if that is only on Windows boxes with 3d Acceleration or everywhere Metal is used.

The definitely are separate antennas (which is why the BCM94360CD can do 1200 Mbps with 3x3 MIMO... I regularly get 500-600 from the next room).

 

[iMac-Oldschool]

Aw, darn. I thought it was just an occasional thing that popped up.

It's quite likely that "bad connection" is just what the software displays when it really means "can't create a Metal device/talk to the iPad at all", sadly. Sidecar probably relies on new features in CoreDisplay/SkyLight which won't work on non-Metal systems with my sketchy acceleration patch. That's why I was so surprised when I thought you had it mostly working.

We need a better acceleration solution. Both for this, accessibility features, Photos, Siri, graphical glitches and just general stability. My wrappers were never intended to be the final answer.

Tried Sidecar again on an iMac13,1 that supports Metal with the same iPad and cable. It worked without generating any error messages. The default desktop picture from Catalina appeared on the iPad, which didn't work before.
"I'm glad I didn't pay money for this feature." Overall, the functionality appeared to be very limited and difficult to use. On the other hand, at this stage of the development there may be more features to come.
Connecting with Bluetooth instead of Lighting cable generated the error message shown in the screen shot.
Overall, there's a long way to go with this feature.

 

[Starplayr]

The definitely are separate antennas (which is why the BCM94360CD can do 1200 Mbps with 3x3 MIMO... I regularly get 500-600 from the next room).

It’s really nice. Will the same card work in a iMac 12,1? It’s the 27 inch Mac 2011.

 

[flygbuss]

You might be right. I have also run a Mac mini without an antenna attached and it ran about the small with one.

It's cool that it has four. Does one supply power to the Bluetooth or are they all just Antennas?

I was glad I did not have to rig anything with that power thing-a-jig or USB cable-ma-bob.

Does the Mac Pro 5,1 differ if its Bluetooth setup than a 3,1?

I can say I am so happy I make the change. Other than the bus speed being slower and SSD drives not running their full speed in the drive bays, which to me still is not a bad speed compared to rotational media, I am very happy with the Mac Pro 3,1.

I put back in my original SuperDrives. Laser on those are running good and I can burn Data and watch a DVD at the same time.

I am getting back into burning to support boot CDs. There will also be boot USB drives and partitions, but looking at it from all angles.

Really the only thing it hasn't done well is virtualization. So I plan to support most OS' on it natively and forget about VMs on the box. Also VMWare has this nasty black screen bug and it's not easy to fix it because it relies on Screen Recording feature on Catalina and VMware Fusion does no always ask for permission, so it can't be set. Some users have upgraded to VMware Fusion 11, but I don't know if my box can even support it. Fusion 11 is added Metal support though, but not sure if that is only on Windows boxes with 3d Acceleration or everywhere Metal is used.

The antennas seem to be located differently since some cMP 1,1 have a poor Bluetooth performance which can be fixed by switching the antenna cables. Maybe they mislabeled some batches during production, I don’t know.

 

[Starplayr]

Tip: if your SuperDrive laser is going bad which could be caused by dust inside or it is jus having a hard time calibrating,

I have found the Verbatim 700 MB silver CD-Rs work really well. Lost of my other CD-Rs would not work. And if I could get the blank CD-R or a blank DVD-RW to mount, then I could usually burn to them using a burn folder.

1 of my 3 SuperDrives was acting up. So I kicked it to the curb for awhile.

The antennas seem to be located differently since some cMP 1,1 have a poor Bluetooth performance which can be fixed by switching the antenna cables. Maybe they mislabeled some batches during production, I don’t know.

moving from Bluetooth 2 or what version it came with to v4 is a night and day difference. Impressive performance.

I’d like to one day move up to a Mac Pro 2010/2012 but I can rap my head around them being on average 750 or more. The 2008 does everything I need to do natively. My iMac can do some virtualization.

I will be using RAMdisks and RAID0 on two SATA IiI drives to speed up disk cloning testing.

I also want to see if my Mac Pro holds RAMDisk data between boots. As that would speed up emergency disk testing.

I’m very close on a good solution for cloning Windows DiskS, but probably only ones on MBR partitionsz

 

[0134168]

You might be right. I have also run a Mac mini without an antenna attached and it ran about the small with one.

It's cool that it has four. Does one supply power to the Bluetooth or are they all just Antennas?

I was glad I did not have to rig anything with that power thing-a-jig or USB cable-ma-bob.

Does the Mac Pro 5,1 differ if its Bluetooth setup than a 3,1?

I can say I am so happy I make the change. Other than the bus speed being slower and SSD drives not running their full speed in the drive bays, which to me still is not a bad speed compared to rotational media, I am very happy with the Mac Pro 3,1.

I put back in my original SuperDrives. Laser on those are running good and I can burn Data and watch a DVD at the same time.

I am getting back into burning to support boot CDs. There will also be boot USB drives and partitions, but looking at it from all angles.

Really the only thing it hasn't done well is virtualization. So I plan to support most OS' on it natively and forget about VMs on the box. Also VMWare has this nasty black screen bug and it's not easy to fix it because it relies on Screen Recording feature on Catalina and VMware Fusion does no always ask for permission, so it can't be set. Some users have upgraded to VMware Fusion 11, but I don't know if my box can even support it. Fusion 11 is added Metal support though, but not sure if that is only on Windows boxes with 3d Acceleration or everywhere Metal is used.

Just antennas.

 

[Hunterkillz123]

Anyone having an issue getting this patch to run on a Mac Pro 3,1?

 

[Starplayr]

I noticed that on Apple RAID, APFS disks are bootable now, as I have cloned a system to one and it boots up fine in Catalina and you can select it on Apple’s boot screen. However, Apple’s installer including dosdude1’s patches installer grays out volumes that are formatted as Apple RAID and the errors is because it’s an Apple RAID.

I’m doing some more testing this week with Apple RAID and Catalina to see if there are any downsides or issues.

Tip: In disk utility, if you select disks instead of volumes to create an Apple RAID using the RAID assistant it will not let you partition the volume into smaller volumes. To work around this, take two or more disks, partition them using HFS+, Mac OS Extended Journaled, now when you go to RAID assistant you can have volumes that you can pair up and then you can pick HFS+ or APFS for those RAIDed volumes. I don’t know yet booting wise is there is a difference between RAID disks by physical disks vs. ones made by volumes, but I will have that answer later this week.
[doublepost=1562816666][/doublepost]

Anyone having an issue getting this patch to run on a Mac Pro 3,1?

Did you boot back up to the installer disk and run the post install?

I use my own patch tool, but I don’t know if any issues with dosdude1’s. What problem are you having?

 

[Hunterkillz123]

I noticed that on Apple RAID, APFS disks are bootable now, as I have cloned a system to one and it boots up fine in Catalina and you can select it on Apple’s boot screen. However, Apple’s installer including dosdude1’s patches installer grays out volumes that are formatted as Apple RAID and the errors is because it’s an Apple RAID.

I’m doing some more testing this week with Apple RAID and Catalina to see if there are any downsides or issues.

Tip: In disk utility, if you select disks instead of volumes to create an Apple RAID using the RAID assistant it will not let you partition the volume into smaller volumes. To work around this, take two or more disks, partition them using HFS+, Mac OS Extended Journaled, now when you go to RAID assistant you can have volumes that you can pair up and then you can pick HFS+ or APFS for those RAIDed volumes. I don’t know yet booting wise is there is a difference between RAID disks by physical disks vs. ones made by volumes, but I will have that answer later this week.
[doublepost=1562816666][/doublepost]
Did you boot back up to the installer disk and run the post install?

I use my own patch tool, but I don’t know if any issues with dosdude1’s. What problem are you having?

I ran it, applied update and my hard drive will not show up/run. I was trynna get it going, but as soon as it comes up it sends it to the flash drive. If the flash drive is removed you get the circle with a line through it, then you get a file not found folder after a bit. Any ideas? Are you running a 3,1?
[doublepost=1562817224][/doublepost]

I ran it, applied update and my hard drive will not show up/run. I was trynna get it going, but as soon as it comes up it sends it to the flash drive. If the flash drive is removed you get the circle with a line through it, then you get a file not found folder after a bit. Any ideas? Are you running a 3,1?

Was there ever a BIOS or update to the firmware on the 3,1? These haven’t been touched in along time, so that maybe the issue. Thanks

 

[dosdude1]

I ran it, applied update and my hard drive will not show up/run. I was trynna get it going, but as soon as it comes up it sends it to the flash drive. If the flash drive is removed you get the circle with a line through it, then you get a file not found folder after a bit. Any ideas? Are you running a 3,1?
[doublepost=1562817224][/doublepost]
Was there ever a BIOS or update to the firmware on the 3,1? These haven’t been touched in along time, so that maybe the issue. Thanks

Yeah, you need to patch your BootROM for APFS support first. You can do that using APFS ROM Patcher, found here. ZIP password is "apfs".

 

[Starplayr]

I ran it, applied update and my hard drive will not show up/run. I was trynna get it going, but as soon as it comes up it sends it to the flash drive. If the flash drive is removed you get the circle with a line through it, then you get a file not found folder after a bit. Any ideas? Are you running a 3,1?
[doublepost=1562817224][/doublepost]
Was there ever a BIOS or update to the firmware on the 3,1? These haven’t been touched in along time, so that maybe the issue. Thanks

ahh, did you apply the APFS firmware patch? Have you’ve been able to run Catalina before?
[doublepost=1562817611][/doublepost]

Yeah, you need to patch your BootROM for APFS support first. You can do that using APFS ROM Patcher, found here. ZIP password is "apfs".

lol. I thought the same thing.

 

[Hunterkillz123]

ahh, did you apply the APFS firmware patch? Have you’ve been able to run Catalina before?

Yes on mac pro 5,1. Not on the 3,1. Should have walked up instead of jumping from like 10.10 to 10.15.

 

[Starplayr]

I ran it, applied update and my hard drive will not show up/run. I was trynna get it going, but as soon as it comes up it sends it to the flash drive. If the flash drive is removed you get the circle with a line through it, then you get a file not found folder after a bit. Any ideas? Are you running a 3,1?
[doublepost=1562817224][/doublepost]
Was there ever a BIOS or update to the firmware on the 3,1? These haven’t been touched in along time, so that maybe the issue. Thanks

I am running on MP3,1 as well.

 

[Kevbasscat]

I am running on MP3,1 as well.

[doublepost=1562819931][/doublepost]

Yes on mac pro 5,1. Not on the 3,1. Should have walked up instead of jumping from like 10.10 to 10.15.

You should upgrade to High Sierra 10.13.6 first. It does the Apfs firmware update and converts your disk or partition to Apfs, then you can update to Mojave, 10.14.6.

 

[tsialex]

[doublepost=1562819931][/doublepost]

You should upgrade to High Sierra 10.13.6 first. It does the Apfs firmware update and converts your disk or partition to Apfs, then you can update to Mojave, 10.14.6.

This is valid for a MP5,1, not for a MP3,1. MP3,1 official support stopped with 10.11.6 and Apple never issued an APFS firmware for any Mac Pro older than MP5,1.

 

[jackluke]

This is what it says when I connect my iPhone SE to my iMac then the screen on my iPhone SE goes black

Sidecar is fitted only for IpadOS devices.

https://www.apple.com/ipados/ipados-preview/
https://www.apple.com/ipados/ipados-preview/features/

 

[LuisN]

I've never seen a tear down of a MacPro that exposed the actual wifi antennas but have suspected that they are all identical.

 

[Flacko]

You might be right. I have also run a Mac mini without an antenna attached and it ran about the small with one.

It's cool that it has four. Does one supply power to the Bluetooth or are they all just Antennas?

I was glad I did not have to rig anything with that power thing-a-jig or USB cable-ma-bob.

Does the Mac Pro 5,1 differ if its Bluetooth setup than a 3,1?

I can say I am so happy I make the change. Other than the bus speed being slower and SSD drives not running their full speed in the drive bays, which to me still is not a bad speed compared to rotational media, I am very happy with the Mac Pro 3,1.

I put back in my original SuperDrives. Laser on those are running good and I can burn Data and watch a DVD at the same time.

I am getting back into burning to support boot CDs. There will also be boot USB drives and partitions, but looking at it from all angles.

Really the only thing it hasn't done well is virtualization. So I plan to support most OS' on it natively and forget about VMs on the box. Also VMWare has this nasty black screen bug and it's not easy to fix it because it relies on Screen Recording feature on Catalina and VMware Fusion does no always ask for permission, so it can't be set. Some users have upgraded to VMware Fusion 11, but I don't know if my box can even support it. Fusion 11 is added Metal support though, but not sure if that is only on Windows boxes with 3d Acceleration or everywhere Metal is used.

The mp3.1 has the 3 Wi-Fi aerials under the plastic panel at the front of the machine. Look underneath. It appears not to really matter the order these are connected. The BT aerial is at the rear of the Mac near the fan outlet. This connects to J3 on the BCM94360CD.

USB power for the BT part is supplied through the mini pcie connector on the mp3.1. For the 4.1/5.1 the USB power connector needs to be made from the adapter to the connector on the main board.
This card works well under both Mojave and Catalina in a mp3.1. Much better than the original where the BT was always a bit flaky. Wifi presently connected at 1053 Mbps so pretty good.

 

[Minh_Ton]

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

In Mojave Software Update also have its own Privateframework SoftwareUpdate.framework .That is not new in Catalina.

 

[ionian]

Hi Folks,

I hope all is well. Just wanted to thank the developers for all the hard work and trying to keep old but perfectly capable workhorses from becoming obsolete.

I wanted to report that I tried to install Catalina DP2 and DP3 on a Macbook Pro 5,4 and Mac Mini 3,1, both patched to run APFS and the installation fails at 4 minutes remaining. No apparent errors; the workstations just reboot by themselves. When booting back to the thumb drive with the Catalina installer and running the Post Install tool I get the error.

"There does not seem to be a valid install of Catalina on your system".

Any thoughts?

I used Dosdude1's latest patcher and 1b6.

 

[jhowarth]

The mp3.1 has the 3 Wi-Fi aerials under the plastic panel at the front of the machine. Look underneath. It appears not to really matter the order these are connected. The BT aerial is at the rear of the Mac near the fan outlet. This connects to J3 on the BCM94360CD.

View attachment 847680
View attachment 847681
USB power for the BT part is supplied through the mini pcie connector on the mp3.1. For the 4.1/5.1 the USB power connector needs to be made from the adapter to the connector on the main board.
This card works well under both Mojave and Catalina in a mp3.1. Much better than the original where the BT was always a bit flaky. Wifi presently connected at 1053 Mbps so pretty good.

The front panel antenna assembly looks interesting. It is hard to tell from that photograph if the small metallic modules above the mounting points are the actual antennas. If so, it kinda looks like the antenna assembly has a fourth unused antenna, no?

 

[0134168]

I noticed that on Apple RAID, APFS disks are bootable now, as I have cloned a system to one and it boots up fine in Catalina and you can select it on Apple’s boot screen. However, Apple’s installer including dosdude1’s patches installer grays out volumes that are formatted as Apple RAID and the errors is because it’s an Apple RAID.

I’m doing some more testing this week with Apple RAID and Catalina to see if there are any downsides or issues.

Tip: In disk utility, if you select disks instead of volumes to create an Apple RAID using the RAID assistant it will not let you partition the volume into smaller volumes. To work around this, take two or more disks, partition them using HFS+, Mac OS Extended Journaled, now when you go to RAID assistant you can have volumes that you can pair up and then you can pick HFS+ or APFS for those RAIDed volumes. I don’t know yet booting wise is there is a difference between RAID disks by physical disks vs. ones made by volumes, but I will have that answer later this week.
[doublepost=1562816666][/doublepost]
Did you boot back up to the installer disk and run the post install?

I use my own patch tool, but I don’t know if any issues with dosdude1’s. What problem are you having?

Oficially, Mojave is not supported on RAID, that´s the reason you can´t clean install it.. But if you clone it , runs fine.

Of course, you will not have recovery partition.