macOS 10.15 Catalina on Unsupported Macs

[jackluke]

Here you go.

EDIT: another quirk with this beta. otool won't work without command line tools which it attempts to download and install automatically (like xcode-select), but the installation fails for some unknown reason.

I had to download the Xcode 11 beta cl tools directly from Apple.

You're right since I also successfully downloaded from Xcode-select and at the end of "progress install bar" I got "error can't install", but after checking the Terminal Catalina beta1 otool was working.
Anyway is surely better download in your way, since the Xcode-select installation apparently doesn't complete properly.

 

[Starplayr]

On the cloning side of things,

I installed pv using homebrew and used it's size attribute to get an ETA. Today at work my boss left to work for CouchBase and I'm backing up his old machine using dd. His hard disk is full, so dd is best of the job. Anyways using PV you can include -s in bytes and it looks something like this. (This was mentioned before but without -s).

sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk3 bs=1m | pv -s 500000000000 | dd of=/Volumes/name/filename.img.dmg bs=1m
110GiB 0:18:03 [ 101MiB/s] [========> ] 23% ETA 0:57:58

-s in an integer on macOS

So now you have a progress bar in the command line.

Steps. Install home-brew.

brew install pv

diskutil list
-> find the /dev/disk#

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk#

sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk# bs=1m | pv -s 500000000000 | dd of=/Volumes/name/filename.img.dmg bs=1m

you can use rdisk or disk. r is risky, unbuffered and faster. turn sleep off just in case.

you can go from disk to disk but make sure the parent is not gonna be run as they will have the same UUIDs.

============

Cloning APFS at a high level:

Apple has an API to clone APFS file systems. If I have any luck with it and find it is suitable to clone Catalina, I will be writing CloneToolX. It will be small. It may include block level copying but if the Apple's API works better, we will be able to save a good portion of disk space as APFS volumes are sparse. This is not just for unpatched systems, but it will be a benefit to all macOS users. I know there is SuperDuper and CCC, and they work well, but I really want something that is dead simple, fast and free. No trials, no keys. Totally anonymous and tiny.

 

[haralds]

Zero Mac App Store app problems, TweetBoot 3 works perfectly.

I installed from scratch with VMware Fusion to a raw disk and shutdown at InstallAssistant, running it from my real MP5,1.

View attachment 842031

My problems might be caused because it wa installed on another system. I will wait, not worth bothering to much with it.

 

[pkouame]

On the cloning side of things,

I installed pv using homebrew and used it's size attribute to get an ETA. Today at work my boss left to work for CouchBase and I'm backing up his old machine using dd. His hard disk is full, so dd is best of the job. Anyways using PV you can include -s in bytes and it looks something like this. (This was mentioned before but without -s).

sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk3 bs=1m | pv -s 500000000000 | dd of=/Volumes/name/filename.img.dmg bs=1m
110GiB 0:18:03 [ 101MiB/s] [========> ] 23% ETA 0:57:58

-s in an integer on macOS

So now you have a progress bar in the command line.

Steps. Install home-brew.

brew install pv

diskutil list
-> find the /dev/disk#

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk#

sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk# bs=1m | pv -s 500000000000 | dd of=/Volumes/name/filename.img.dmg bs=1m

you can use rdisk or disk. r is risky, unbuffered and faster. turn sleep off just in case.

you can go from disk to disk but make sure the parent is not gonna be run as they will have the same UUIDs.

============

Cloning APFS at a high level:

Apple has an API to clone APFS file systems. If I have any luck with it and find it is suitable to clone Catalina, I will be writing CloneToolX. It will be small. It may include block level copying but if the Apple's API works better, we will be able to save a good portion of disk space as APFS volumes are sparse. This is not just for unpatched systems, but it will be a benefit to all macOS users. I know there is SuperDuper and CCC, and they work well, but I really want something that is dead simple, fast and free. No trials, no keys. Totally anonymous and tiny.

Excellent. Can't wait for CloneToolX ! I'll be your first user ...
[doublepost=1560177433][/doublepost]Catalina image running on Mac Pro 3,1.

Runs great out of the box. (accelerated since I have a metal capable card)

My path to this may help some, so at a high level:

1. Installed Catalina on USB from a supported machine
2. with nvram boot-arg settings - a few kext tweaks - a new prelinkedkernel - got it to boot on mbp 5,3
3. finished the setup on the mbp 5,3
4. cloned the external USB disk to an image file (I also compressed it)
5. used "dd" to bit/block copy the image to a new internal APFS partition -> bootable Cat on mbp 5,3
6. copied the image to my Mac Pro 3,1 running Mojave
7. used "dd" to bit/block copy the image to an internal SSD APFS partition -> bootable Cat on mp 3,1
8. profit.

For more details - read the previous pages and follow the thread (it's barely 30 pages compared to Mojave's 600!). There are many variants of this of course. Just wanted to share my workflow (up till now)

 

[j2048b]

Excellent. Can't wait for CloneToolX ! I'll be your first user ...
[doublepost=1560177433][/doublepost]Catalina image running on Mac Pro 3,1.

Runs great out of the box. (accelerated since I have a metal capable card)

My path to this may help some, so at a high level:

1. Installed Catalina on USB from a supported machine
2. with nvram boot-arg settings - a few kext tweaks - a new prelinkedkernel - got it to boot on mbp 5,3
3. finished the setup on the mbp 5,3
4. cloned the external USB disk to an image file (I also compressed it)
5. used "dd" to bit/block copy the image to a new internal APFS partition -> bootable Cat on mbp 5,3
6. copied the image to my Mac Pro 3,1 running Mojave
7. used "dd" to bit/block copy the image to an internal SSD APFS partition -> bootable Cat on mp 3,1
8. profit.

For more details - read the previous pages and follow the thread (it's barely 30 pages compared to Mojave's 600!). There are many variants of this of course. Just wanted to share my workflow (up till now)

View attachment 842098

That looks amazing, yes high level, way over my head , havent even installed mojave on my mbp 3,1 so im a bit behind, so will have to do that and then try this, might need to google some of ur jargon etc....

 

[Starplayr]

Excellent. Can't wait for CloneToolX ! I'll be your first user ...
[doublepost=1560177433][/doublepost]Catalina image running on Mac Pro 3,1.

Runs great out of the box. (accelerated since I have a metal capable card)

My path to this may help some, so at a high level:

1. Installed Catalina on USB from a supported machine
2. with nvram boot-arg settings - a few kext tweaks - a new prelinkedkernel - got it to boot on mbp 5,3
3. finished the setup on the mbp 5,3
4. cloned the external USB disk to an image file (I also compressed it)
5. used "dd" to bit/block copy the image to a new internal APFS partition -> bootable Cat on mbp 5,3
6. copied the image to my Mac Pro 3,1 running Mojave
7. used "dd" to bit/block copy the image to an internal SSD APFS partition -> bootable Cat on mp 3,1
8. profit.

For more details - read the previous pages and follow the thread (it's barely 30 pages compared to Mojave's 600!). There are many variants of this of course. Just wanted to share my workflow (up till now)

View attachment 842098

Great! Let know which kexts or patches go run for WiFi, Sound and Power Management as those are the three things I haven’t messed with yet.

I lost USB charging with Catalina, sure that is lack of Power Mgt.

 

[TimothyR734]

Excellent. Can't wait for CloneToolX ! I'll be your first user ...
[doublepost=1560177433][/doublepost]Catalina image running on Mac Pro 3,1.

Runs great out of the box. (accelerated since I have a metal capable card)

My path to this may help some, so at a high level:

1. Installed Catalina on USB from a supported machine
2. with nvram boot-arg settings - a few kext tweaks - a new prelinkedkernel - got it to boot on mbp 5,3
3. finished the setup on the mbp 5,3
4. cloned the external USB disk to an image file (I also compressed it)
5. used "dd" to bit/block copy the image to a new internal APFS partition -> bootable Cat on mbp 5,3
6. copied the image to my Mac Pro 3,1 running Mojave
7. used "dd" to bit/block copy the image to an internal SSD APFS partition -> bootable Cat on mp 3,1
8. profit.

For more details - read the previous pages and follow the thread (it's barely 30 pages compared to Mojave's 600!). There are many variants of this of course. Just wanted to share my workflow (up till now)

View attachment 842098

That looks beautiful amazing work getting it up and running

 

[Larsvonhier]

Hint for all the Catalina cloners out there:
Even the standard DD command gives runtime-info while working when you press "control T". Estimation of progress is possible then. I started all over when I noticed that the std block size (512bytes) is not really optimal for SSDs (4096byte blocks give twice the speed).

 

[crazybirdy]

Yes, I tried that too, but after typing exit it will stuck or kernel panic, while the Basesystem.dmg will work exactly as a Recovery.

I also tried to fill the vm and Users and Library folders the ones in /Device/ putting its content in the Catalina HFS+ root, also moving the /system/applications/ but apart a working single user nothing else, most probably because it needs some POSIX symlinks to redirect all those new Catalina APFS data system folders inside a structure that HFS+ can interpret. This is possible unless apple have updated also some APFS.kext and APFS.framework, and introduced some new security framework.

Nice try.
I tried to install Catalina to HFS+ with dosdude1's Mojave Patcher method.
System volume "/Volumes/Catalina/" is installed fine without issue.
After success install the HFS+ System volume, we get
/Volumes/Catalina/System/Library/Templates/Data
/Volumes/Catalina/System/Volumes/Data

and boot -s to Single User mode without issues,
but can't boot to system with "userspace panic" as below.
I think the problem is we don't create the /Volumes/Catalina - Data/ (for read-write user data partition)


So, we need two HFS+ partitions to make it work as APFS.
Partition name /Catalina/ (for read-only system partition)
Partition name /Catalina - Data/ (for read-write user data partition)

All we need to do is .. find a way to make it work..
1.Copy all /Volumes/Catalina/System/Library/Templates/Data to /Volumes/Catalina - Data/ on Mojave (for read-write user data partition)
2.mount partition /Catalina - Data/ to mount_point /Volume/Catalina/System/Volumes/Data during booting Catalina.
3.make sure all POSIX symlinks redirect to the right place to /Volume/Catalina/System/Volumes/Data/

I can't find solution. Just FYI.

 

[applCore]

Same. I have been using Objective-C for a very long time, and I personally see absolutely no need at all to switch to Swift. The syntax is extremely different (worse IMO), and anything you can do with Swift you can do with Objective-C, along with having an immense amount of compatibility (I've written an app that could run on iOS 5 up to the latest version of iOS, while also supporting all display sizes and looking "modern"). My macOS patchers have all been written on Objective-C, and as such work perfectly on as old as OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Compatibility is a huge focus point for me in any programming project, and the use of Swift unnecessarily takes away from that possibility.

The question is... how long will obj-c be supported? One would like to think "forever" but I, and many others, are super worried about where Apple is clearly going right now. I think we're going to have to start pushing effort towards Darling to have a safe macOS future at this point. Apple is now a scary beast and I can't take them out of the same basket that MS and others are in now as their actions are clearly painting their path to a non-open (not as in open source, but as in open to users' tinkering and modification - ie jailbroken) OS and that's not acceptable.

 

[Starplayr]

Hint for all the Catalina cloners out there:
Even the standard DD command gives runtime-info while working when you press "control T". Estimation of progress is possible then. I started all over when I noticed that the std block size (512bytes) is not really optimal for SSDs (4096byte blocks give twice the speed).

Yes, the Control-T has been mentioned.

With my SSDs, I compared bs=1m with bs=4m or bs=4096 and for me 1m (1024) gained more speed over time especially if rdisk is available. I found rdisk is not always available. It's not on on Mojave system at work.

With wagon wheel hard drives 512 is recommended which is what I'm doing today.

also dd and diskutil are available on the recovery disk and I would imagine they are available on the standard USB installer disk as well. Which is nice!
[doublepost=1560184834][/doublepost]

The question is... how long will obj-c be supported? One would like to think "forever" but I, and many others, are super worried about where Apple is clearly going right now. I think we're going to have to start pushing effort towards Darling to have a safe macOS future at this point. Apple is now a scary beast and I can't take them out of the same basket that MS and others are in now as their actions are clearly painting their path to a non-open (not as in open source, but as in open to users' tinkering and modification - ie jailbroken) OS and that's not acceptable.

I heard Apple wants devs to start phasing out Obj-C. I don't know how true that is. Swift has lost some momentum recently. Swift 5 is tied closely with the OS now. Before Swift relied on its own Swift libs inside the app. And that change has slowed down progress on Android and Windows 10. Overall, I think developing Swift is faster than Objective-C but that can depend on one's knowledge of each language which will differ. For beginners, Swift is easier. And I think for Advanced users, Swift is easy to adopt. But again if you've been doing Objective-C for 10 - 20 years straight naturally that is going to be easier and better for you. I am finding most Apple's examples are in Swift now and you won't find hardly any new examples in Obj-C. 5 years ago it was the other way around. So you can tell that's where Apple is going. Doesn't mean you have to. It's up the developer and shop. And there will always be the NeXT Best Thing. Whatever it is.

 

[jackluke]

Nice try.
I tried to install Catalina to HFS+ with dosdude1's Mojave Patcher method.
System volume "/Volumes/Catalina/" is installed fine without issue.
After success install the HFS+ System volume, we get
/Volumes/Catalina/System/Library/Templates/Data
/Volumes/Catalina/System/Volumes/Data

and boot -s to Single User mode without issues,
but can't boot to system with "userspace panic" as below.
I think the problem is we don't create the /Volumes/Catalina - Data/ (for read-write user data partition)
View attachment 842110

So, we need two HFS+ partition to make it work as APFS.
/Volumes/Catalina/ (for read-only system partition)
/Volumes/Catalina - Data/ (for read-write user data partition)

All we need to do is .. find a way to make it work..
1.Copy all /Volumes/Catalina/System/Library/Templates/Data to /Volumes/Catalina - Data/ (for read-write user data partition)
2.mount /Volumes/Catalina - Data/ to be /Volume/Catalina/System/Volumes/Data during booting Catalina.
3.make sure all POSIX symlinks redirect to the right place to /Volume/Catalina/System/Volumes/Data

I can't find solution. Just FYI.

Yes, I got same yours results, the fact is that JHFS+ I guess is totally unaware how to manage a "Users and Library" splitted on another separate HFS+ volume not containerized, the only splitted partition that it can manage is the "Recovery HD" (essentially the BaseSystem.dmg).

That's really weird since during Mojave the APFS Container "System+VM+Preboot" were automatically combined by the Mojave Installer in one only "HFS+ System Volume" while APFS Recovery was converted in "HFS Recovery HD".

So apple with this new APFS System/Data splitting, and not only, changed also the typical HFS+ root folder layout, I guess won't be more feasible.

More over if you noticed from a Catalina APFS Installation, booting in single user mode, you can't more type "fsck -fy" since a "/dev/diskX/" must be mounted in read-only, but apparently it is already in read-only, until the "mount -uw /", and from single user mode "kextcache" can't be more executed due to a new security framework, and to make things worse they changed the bash in zsh.

So I guess they added some other layer of security in APFS booting and this doesn't help a manual HFS+ convert.

 

[Starplayr]

Yes, I got same yours results, the fact is that JHFS+ I guess is totally unaware how to manage a "Users and Library" splitted on another separate HFS+ volume not containerized, the only splitted partition that it can manage is the "Recovery HD".

That's really weird since during Mojave the APFS Container System+VM+Preboot were automatically combined by the Mojave Installer while APFS Recovery was converted in HFS Recovery HD.

So apple with this new APFS System/Data splitting, and not only, changed also the typical HFS+ folder layout, I guess won't be more feasible.

Note in Unix and XNU, you could always move the user's home directory to another volume. I don't know how different the old way vs. the new way is on Catalina. I haven't explored it.

Yes there is more stuff on different volumes now on Catalina in APFS. This is the first time for me, but I am ditching HFS+. Mojave latest updates and Catalina require it. It think working around it is just gonna cause issues.

I have a couples Macs at work that won't update to 10.14.5 until they are converted to APFS.

 

[applCore]

FWIW, everyone who is considering upgrading from HFS+ to APFS should NOT do it. I have experienced corruption that was irrecoverable after 4-8 months on 3 workstations that were migrated in this fashion. On the other hand workstations that were formatted freshly to APFS with no conversion have been doing really well on power outages, panics and hard power offs.

 

[TimothyR734]

Yes, I got same yours results, the fact is that JHFS+ I guess is totally unaware how to manage a "Users and Library" splitted on another separate HFS+ volume not containerized, the only splitted partition that it can manage is the "Recovery HD" (essentially the BaseSystem.dmg).

That's really weird since during Mojave the APFS Container "System+VM+Preboot" were automatically combined by the Mojave Installer in one only "HFS+ System Volume" while APFS Recovery was converted in "HFS Recovery HD".

So apple with this new APFS System/Data splitting, and not only, changed also the typical HFS+ root folder layout, I guess won't be more feasible.

More over if you noticed from a Catalina APFS Installation, booting in single user mode, you can't more type "fsck -fy" since a "/dev/diskX/" must be mounted in read-only, but apparently it is already in read-only, until the "mount -uw /", and from single user mode "kextcache" can't be more executed due to a new security framework, and to make things worse they changed the bash in zsh.

So I guess they added some other layer of security in APFS booting and this doesn't help a manual HFS+ convert.

I already converted my Mojave terminal to Oh My ZSH

 

[0403979]

I just wanted to update everyone on my progress. So far, I have Catalina installed and running on my MacBook7,1 (2010) and my MacBook4,1 (2008). The only issues are: 1. No graphics acceleration on either model (this has been the case on the MacBook4,1 since Mavericks so nothing new there), 2. The installer works perfectly but unfortunately it can't be used to install Catalina because of the new APFS volume changes. However, if you install using the installer app on a supported Mac and then clone it to an unsupported Mac, it works fine.

Expect a developer beta of macOS Patcher 3 with Catalina support to be released within a few days. Attention: It will be a developer beta without installation and acceleration support and it's not recommended for most users. For Macs with Metal cards, it should work with acceleration.

 

[pkouame]

The question is... how long will obj-c be supported? One would like to think "forever" but I, and many others, are super worried about where Apple is clearly going right now. I think we're going to have to start pushing effort towards Darling to have a safe macOS future at this point. Apple is now a scary beast and I can't take them out of the same basket that MS and others are in now as their actions are clearly painting their path to a non-open (not as in open source, but as in open to users' tinkering and modification - ie jailbroken) OS and that's not acceptable.

If you watch the super hard core session videos at WWDC , like on metal and debugging techniques, you’ll see that the top notch engineers still demonstrate with ObjC (cause it’s so Low level like C) So no I do t think ObjC is going anywhere soon. Thank God.

 

[TMRJIJ]

I just wanted to update everyone on my progress. So far, I have Catalina installed and running on my MacBook7,1 (2010) and my MacBook4,1 (2008). The only issues are: 1. No graphics acceleration on either model (this has been the case on the MacBook4,1 since Mavericks so nothing new there), 2. The installer works perfectly but unfortunately it can't be used to install Catalina because of the new APFS volume changes. However, if you install using the installer app on a supported Mac and then clone it to an unsupported Mac, it works fine.

Expect a developer beta of macOS Patcher 3 with Catalina support to be released within a few days. Attention: It will be a developer beta without installation and acceleration support and it's not recommended for most users. For Macs with Metal cards, it should work with acceleration.

View attachment 842127 View attachment 842128

Are you still interested in collaborating on OS X Patcher and macOS Patcher? I don't have much time to do any intense work on this, but I picked up a few tricks from macOSE that can possibly help remediate some OpenGL limitations and can easily wrap those script functions into a GUI Installer

 

[0403979]

Are you still interested in collaborating on OS X Patcher and macOS Patcher? I don't have much time to do any intense work on this, but I picked up a few tricks from macOSE that can possibly help remediate some OpenGL limitations and can easily wrap those script functions into a GUI Installer

Yes, I'd still like your help with OS X Patcher. But at the moment I'm mainly focusing on Catalina and macOS Patcher. When I have some more free time, then I'll DM you and discuss it. Thanks again for the offer. I'll take you up on it when I can.

 

[pkouame]

Are you still interested in collaborating on OS X Patcher and macOS Patcher? I don't have much time to do any intense work on this, but I picked up a few tricks from macOSE that can possibly help remediate some OpenGL limitations and can easily wrap those script functions into a GUI Installer

Hi - just curious about the OpenGL limitations you have some fixes for...
[doublepost=1560191167][/doublepost]

Hint for all the Catalina cloners out there:
Even the standard DD command gives runtime-info while working when you press "control T". Estimation of progress is possible then. I started all over when I noticed that the std block size (512bytes) is not really optimal for SSDs (4096byte blocks give twice the speed).

I've used bs=1m with success so far. Even larger...

 

[TMRJIJ]

Hi - just curious about the OpenGL limitations you have some fixes for...

Just a few small changes, this is coming from MacBook 4,1 though.

• Obviously, I had to change AppleIntelGMAX3100 to use AppleVADriver instead of the AppleIntelGMAX3100VADriver, since it only had an i386 slice.
• I would often compress the Dock icons so it would run smoother.
• Disable Animations of course but I was working on trying to integrate cDock in my macOSE since it was the only known way to add some transparency back.
• A few Quicktime plugins that I kept (which I don't know will work on Mojave and Catalina) gave me some success in video playback.
• Used the NoSleep Extension to stop that annoying display issue. I was looking into changing the hibernate modes instead though.
• Disable Beam Sync

Nothing special. Just a few little workarounds that I used in the Mavericks-El Capitan days since nobody could figure out get those beta frameworks to work.

 

[pkouame]

Just a few small changes, this is coming from MacBook 4,1 though.

• Obviously, I had to change AppleIntelGMAX3100 to use AppleVADriver instead of the g AppleIntelGMAX3100VADriver, since it only had an i386 slice.
• I would often compress the Dock icons so it would run smoother.
• Disable Animations of course but I was working on trying to integrate cDock in my macOSE since it was the only known way to add some transparency back.
• A few Quicktime plugins that I kept (which I don't know will work on Mojave and Catalina) gave me some success in video playback.
• Used the NoSleep Extension to stop that annoying display issue. I was looking into changing the hibernate modes instead though.
• Disable Beam Sync

Nothing special. Just a few little workarounds that I used in the Mavericks-El Capitan days since nobody could figure out get those beta frameworks to work.

Got it thanks.

 

[jackluke]

I already converted my Mojave terminal to Oh My ZSH

Yes, I wrongly reported as an obstacle for HFS+ instead it's even easier and functional than classical bash.

I guess you used this to install on Mojave: "brew install zsh"

 

[TimothyR734]

I used this

 

[jackluke]

I used this

I noticed it has many commands to simplify the Terminal/Shell syntax, however I was used to bash.