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macOS 10.15 Catalina on Unsupported Macs

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The first post of this thread is a WikiPost and can be edited by anyone with the appropiate permissions. Your edits will be public.
jhowarth said:
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?
Click to expand...
Here is the other side of the antenna board. Looks to have 4 elements with 3 connected.
Aerials.png
 
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Starplayr said:
Interesting. Looks like it's on the underside.

Makes sense to only have 3 because that is all that's used.

Have you've tried connecting remaining one?
Click to expand...
No, I have used the standard connections. 3 for wifi and the rear antenna board for BT. Not heard of anyone using the possible 4 antenna towards the front.
 
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******* said:
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.
Click to expand...
The Catalina OS Installer blocks it by default. Catalina can run off an APFS Raid. Cat puts a boot loader on Apple RAIDs.

I was not talking about Mojave.
[doublepost=1562855631][/doublepost]
Flacko said:
No, I have used the standard connections. 3 for wifi and the rear antenna board for BT. Not heard of anyone using the possible 4 antenna towards the front.
Click to expand...
The replacement iMac WiFi & BT card has 4 antenna hook ups. 3 WiFi, 1 BT.
[doublepost=1562855751][/doublepost]
Flacko said:
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.
Click to expand...
I love that!
 
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Hi! I've installed Catalina with dosdude1 patch, but my MacBookPro5,1 can't boot from APFS volumes. The only way to run Catalina on this machine is patching the ROM? I doesn't patched my Mac because this is a quite dangerous operation, specially because the modified ROM is not an original software. There's other ways to boot on APFS? Thanks.
 
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NiloGlock said:
Hi! I've installed Catalina with dosdude1 patch, but my MacBookPro5,1 can't boot from APFS volumes. The only way to run Catalina on this machine is patching the ROM? I doesn't patched my Mac because this is a quite dangerous operation, specially because the modified ROM is not an original software. There's other ways to boot on APFS? Thanks.
Click to expand...

Not Yet. You can wait for dosdude1 to create an APFS boot loader. ;)

The patch on 3,1 is not bad. I can't imagine the 5,1 being any worse.
[doublepost=1562858249][/doublepost]I installed Cat B4 last night and it looks like it auto installed the patches. I did not know they are auto applied but just about everything works. My system went to a blank screen. Rebooted, saw the installer media disk, selected it. Install went like a really Mac with black screen, white apple and ETA. When I booted it up to my surprise it always had the patches. I did download the installer disk using 1.0b7 dd1's installer maker.

The only thing missing in the patches is classic Mac OS Standard HFS support (pre Mac OS Extended HFS+ support)

You can use hfs.kext and hfsEncodings.kext from Mojave to get this support added back in. This is helpful for legacy stuff like old data CDs and DVDs that are in the old standard hfs format. To be clear, I'm not talking about Journaled Mac OS Extended HFS+, but the format before it.

Without the kext's from Mojave, you cannot mount old hfs volumes and can't do anything with them.
 
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ionian said:
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.
Click to expand...
As stated, your system needs to have native APFS support at this time in order to run Catalina. If your machine supported High Sierra natively, make sure it's running the latest BootROM version. If it didn't support HS, you'll have to use my APFS ROM Patcher to add APFS support to your BootROM. Otherwise you can just wait until I finish my software APFS booter implementation.
 
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Starplayr said:
The Catalina OS Installer blocks it by default. Catalina can run off an APFS Raid. Cat puts a boot loader on Apple RAIDs.

I was not talking about Mojave.
[doublepost=1562855631][/doublepost]
The replacement iMac WiFi & BT card has 4 antenna hook ups. 3 WiFi, 1 BT.
[doublepost=1562855751][/doublepost]
I love that!
Click to expand...
I know. But if Mojave don´t support installation to RAID, be sure Mojave won´t do it either.
 
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dosdude1 said:
As stated, your system needs to have native APFS support at this time in order to run Catalina. If your machine supported High Sierra natively, make sure it's running the latest BootROM version. If it didn't support HS, you'll have to use my APFS ROM Patcher to add APFS support to your BootROM. Otherwise you can just wait until I finish my software APFS booter implementation.
Click to expand...

I will wait too your APFS booter implementation that has worked perfectly with Mojave since beta 1 until 10.14.5 on Macmini4,1 . @dosdude1 you are a great, thank you again and again! :-D
 
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Starplayr said:
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?
Click to expand...

install in RAID0 works from the Installer USB Mojave and Installer Catalina USB patched Dosdude1, and the only thing you need to do after installation is to rename the bootcaches.plist to bootcaches.bak and it will become bootable and may even receive OTA updates normally.


I've done it step by step before.

diskutil umountDisk disk0
diskutil umountDisk disk1
diskutil umountDisk disk2
gpt destroy /dev/disk0
gpt destroy /dev/disk1
diskutil appleRAID create stripe Storage JHFS+ disk0 disk1

diskuitl umountDisk disk2
gpt create disk2
gpt add -t hfs disk2

- disk2s1 added


Open Disk Utility format to APFS

Install macOS Catalina and post-install patches


/sbin/mount -uw /
mv /usr/standalone/bootcaches.plist /usr/standalone/bootcaches.bak

nice!
 
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webg3 said:
install in RAID0 works from the Mojave patch / USB, and the only thing you need to do after installation is to rename the bootcaches.plist to bootcaches.bak and it will become bootable and may even receive OTA updates normally.


I've done it step by step before.

diskutil umountDisk disk0
diskutil umountDisk disk1
diskutil umountDisk disk2
gpt destroy /dev/disk0
gpt destroy /dev/disk1
diskutil appleRAID create stripe Storage JHFS+ disk0 disk1

diskuitl umountDisk disk2
gpt create disk2
gpt add -t hfs disk2

- disk2s1 added


Open Disk Utility format to APFS

Install macOS Catalina and post-install patches

nice!
Click to expand...

I like your steps.

Doesn’t dosdude1’s patched installer complain that it’s APFS. What is the difference making a RAID this way vs. Apple’s RAID Assistant? And there are two ways of making Apple RAID’s. one is by whole disks and another is by slices / Volumes. It looks like you are using the whole disk method and I am wondering if gpt destroy is what is allowing the installer to work. As it could be hiding boot points the other disks.

Anyways. I will test your method out as I like command line alternatives.

Thank you for posting this. Lately Disk Utility hangs up a lot. This will work better.
 
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dosdude1 said:
I'd recommend using a normal USB drive as the installer. An SD card is not suited to boot a copy of macOS.
Click to expand...

@dosdude1 – That's interesting. Because I use SD cards exclusively for patching my Mac Pro 3.1. The patched cards boot either in an SD card slot of my monitor or in a connected USB SD card reader. I have never had problems in this way.

What speaks against it in your opinion?
 
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Starplayr said:
I like your steps.

Doesn’t dosdude1’s patched installer complain that it’s APFS. What is the difference making a RAID this way vs. Apple’s RAID Assistant? And there are two ways of making Apple RAID’s. one is by whole disks and another is by slices / Volumes. It looks like you are using the whole disk method and I am wondering if gpt destroy is what is allowing the installer to work. As it could be hiding boot points the other disks.

Anyways. I will test your method out as I like command line alternatives.

Thank you for posting this. Lately Disk Utility Hang up a lot. This will work better.
Click to expand...
coasterOneEightThree said:
@dosdude1 – That's interesting. Because I use SD cards exclusively for patching my Mac Pro 3.1. The patched cards boot either in an SD card slot of my monitor or in a connected USB SD card reader. I have never had problems in this way.

What speaks against it in your opinion?
Click to expand...
i tried a quick installer off DVD and it was the slowest thing in the world and it sounded like a SyQuest drive.

Does anyone remember IOMega and those blue disk drives?

I used to have tiny optical disks and drives. But they became so unreliable.

CD’s and DVD’s pushed them all out.

Then larger cheaper disk drives and SSDs, flash USB sticks. Even on USB 2.0, most USB sticks boot pretty fast for the base system.
 
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Starplayr said:
i tried a quick installer off DVD and it was the slowest thing in the world and it sounded like a SuQuest drive.

Does anyone remember IOMega and those blue disk drives?

They had 100 Mb one and later something like an 800 Mb one under a different name.

I used to have tiny optical disks and drives. But they became so unreliable.

CD’s and DVD’s pushed them all out.

Then larger cheaper disk drives and SSDs, flash USB sticks. Even on USB 2.0, most USB sticks boot pretty fast for the base system.
Click to expand...
I still have both my IOMega's and the blue disks :)
 
Starplayr said:
i tried a quick installer off DVD and it was the slowest thing in the world and it sounded like a SuQuest drive.

Does anyone remember IOMega and those blue disk drives?

They had 100 Mb one and later something like an 800 Mb one under a different name.

I used to have tiny optical disks and drives. But they became so unreliable.

CD’s and DVD’s pushed them all out.

Then larger cheaper disk drives and SSDs, flash USB sticks. Even on USB 2.0, most USB sticks boot pretty fast for the base system.
Click to expand...

I guess you mean Iomega ZIP- and JAZ-disks.
ZIP disks were in 100, 250 and 750MB
JAZ were in 1 and 2 GB
Still have them in my Amiga A4000T ;)
 

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McStang said:
I guess you mean Iomega ZIP- and JAZ-disks.
ZIP disks were in 100, 250 and 750MB
JAZ were in 1 and 2 GB
Still have them in my Amiga A4000T ;)
Click to expand...
Yup those are the ones. :)
[doublepost=1562883622][/doublepost]
MacClueless said:
Photos I get but does anyone actually use "Maps"?
Click to expand...
I fired it up just to see if it would work. I am not sure it's use on a Mac unless you may be traveling?
 
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