macOS 10.15 Catalina on Unsupported Macs

[DeLacy]

I think everyone struggles at first, some more than others. You are coming along, nicely. The Catalina upgrades can be a royal PITA until the procedures are mastered. Incidentally, blame long passwords for "OTA update fix" issues in @jackluke's CatalinaOTAswufix.app especially with fast network connections for which there is an old trick to prevent any delay. Copy the password from an editor into the Finder clipboard then cmd-v into the authorization screen when required. A handy trick when performing updates. Good work, keep it up. 😎

ZOINKS! My head just fell off. Was I supposed to enter a password? Authorization screen? I just clicked everything as fast as I could and got lucky. Uggh. My progress is unhelpful tp others.

 

[K two]

ZOINKS! My head just fell off. Was I supposed to enter a password? Authorization screen? I just clicked everything as fast as I could and got lucky. Uggh. My progress is unhelpful tp others.

Worry not, you are doing great. How's the upped iMac w/HDD? Our's is slow to boot but nimble with everything else. Soon to yank the DVR and replace it with a 1TB SSD, when I get the courage, I have everything else.

 

[patthedog]

I’ve been happily running High Sierra using the Dosdude patch on my Mac Pro 2008 with a GTX680 card.

It’s time for a clean install though.

Now that there are also patches for Mojave and Catalina I’m wondering how well these run on a 3,1 compared with High Sierra?

Stability and performance (music production) are the deciding factors in my case.

 

[0134168]

I’ve been happily running High Sierra using the Dosdude patch on my Mac Pro 2008 with a GTX680 card.

It’s time for a clean install though.

Now that there are also patches for Mojave and Catalina I’m wondering how well these run on a 3,1 compared with High Sierra?

Stability and performance (music production) are the deciding factors in my case.

Runs so good. In my case, I barely noticed any gain performance from Mojave to Catalina.

 

[gw463]

Ho eseguito felicemente High Sierra usando la patch Dosdude sul mio Mac Pro 2008 con una scheda GTX680.

È giunto il momento per un'installazione pulita.

Ora che ci sono anche patch per Mojave e Catalina, mi chiedo quanto funzionino su un 3,1 rispetto a High Sierra?

Stabilità e performance (produzione musicale) sono i fattori decisivi nel mio caso.

For now it works great on mac pro 3.1 gtx680 dual monitor and the display port also works more than that I can not expect .....

 

[DeLacy]

Worry not, you are doing great. How's the upped iMac w/HDD? Our's is slow to boot but nimble with everything else. Soon to yank the DVR and replace it with a 1TB SSD, when I get the courage, I have everything else.

I have a 4TB external drive, which makes things quite zippy! I forgot to update the firmware and that is what caused a bunch of my Catalina headaches.

 

[nacl9163]

Running into an interesting problem: I recently picked up a Mid-2011 iMac 21.5 that I'm going to use the auto shop I work at (can't stand using someone else's computer, let alone an poorly maintained Lenovo full of dust). I upgraded the GPU to a K1100m (flashed & all that jazz), and I got Catalina set up with dosdude1's patcher. It runs great, except for using the App Store. Trying to install anything from the App Store leads to an immediate reboot.

Anyone come across this issue? It's weird for what is otherwise running smoothly.

Will give it a try--thanks! Question--since I'm already running fine except for loss of contacts, will MA allow me to bring over just contacts, or will it try to move everything, even stuff I've already moved manually?

 

[K two]

Will give it a try--thanks! Question--since I'm already running fine except for loss of contacts, will MA allow me to bring over just contacts, or will it try to move everything, even stuff I've already moved manually?

Migration Assistant does give control over what is brought over, not sure how granular that control may be? Run it and see what it offers? My photographic memory has been in the darkroom of late. 😎

 

[K two]

I’ve been happily running High Sierra using the Dosdude patch on my Mac Pro 2008 with a GTX680 card.

It’s time for a clean install though.

Now that there are also patches for Mojave and Catalina I’m wondering how well these run on a 3,1 compared with High Sierra?

Stability and performance (music production) are the deciding factors in my case.

A reminder: Any 32bit apps and plug-ins which run on Mojave and earlier MacOS will not run in Catalina. This app will ferret them out: https://eclecticlightdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/32bitcheck18.zip

 

[borgo1971]

And I solved this problem too, after creating a new user and trying BBedit there.

I spoke too fast... problem locking application to lunch seems to return randomly: not only it returned with BBedit, but even with VMware Fusion 11.5.6. In both case I resolved logging me in another user account, opening (and qutting) the application there and turning back to my usual user, and then launching again the application.

 

[Bryan Rezende]

There is no Catalina AirDrop Broadcom 4360 patch for (0x14E4, 0x8*) , minimum "supported" cards are 0x9* and higher: 0xA* , 0xB*, 0xC*, 0xD*, 0xE*, 0xF* and so on.
[automerge]1584874546[/automerge]


Till Mojave apple allowed some kind of "AirDrop legacy" that worked also on Atheros wifi cards, from Catalina they merged all the continuity features with a kind of AirDrop enhanced, and only certain recent Broadcom Wifi cards patching the AirPort Brcm4360 Wifi driver can work.

@jackluke thanks for all the helpful posts about AirDrop functionality! It's been driving me nuts that I can't use it or find any good info on why, but now it seems I found the issue. I have that (0x14E4, 0X8D) card on my MBP5,3. I found this on OWC but can't match the product ID to the card type: https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Apple/6614766/#owctabs

Do you think this swap plus the patch would fix it? Thanks.

 

[amstel78]

2008 iMac 2.66 GHz 6Gb RAM
Did clean install using latest dosdudes installer. Went flawlessly, but Migration Asst wouldn't ever work. Finally moved everything manually from Time Machine and other backups. Only thing I couldn't get was my Contacts files. Found them all (I think) as .abcdp files, but can't import them into Contacts.

Were you ever given the option to do a full volume/disk restore?

 

[andre85scarface]

Hello everyone and happy new year. I installed Catalina 10.15.7 on MacBook Pro Mid 2009 but some photography apps don't start. The apps in question are Luminar AI, Luminar 4, and Capture One (I don't try with Lightroom and Photoshop). Luminar AI does not open, the icon bounces but does not start, Luminar 4 opens but after I load a photo it crashes and Capture One does not open at all. I upgraded from El Capitan to work on these apps. There is anyone who can help me?

 

[FlorisVN]

Hello everyone and happy new year. I installed Catalina 10.15.7 on MacBook Pro Mid 2009 but some photography apps don't start. The apps in question are Luminar AI, Luminar 4, and Capture One (I don't try with Lightroom and Photoshop). Luminar AI does not open, the icon bounces but does not start, Luminar 4 opens but after I load a photo it crashes and Capture One does not open at all. I upgraded from El Capitan to work on these apps. There is anyone who can help me?

perhaps these apps require a metal card on newere macos releases, and therefore perhaps not might work well on your non metal nvidia card..

 

[gw463]

Hello everyone and happy new year. I installed Catalina 10.15.7 on MacBook Pro Mid 2009 but some photography apps don't start. The apps in question are Luminar AI, Luminar 4, and Capture One (I don't try with Lightroom and Photoshop). Luminar AI does not open, the icon bounces but does not start, Luminar 4 opens but after I load a photo it crashes and Capture One does not open at all. I upgraded from El Capitan to work on these apps. There is anyone who can help me?

what version of Capture one do you use? I am with 20 and now with 21 no problem. Have you tried reinstalling the soft? Ooops Happy New Year to all fantastic Forum

 

[nacl9163]

Running 10.15.7 dosdude on early 2008 iMac.
I have several programs that simply won't launch, but others launched and ran a few times but now refuse to load, and just give a crash report. Graphic Converter and CleanMyMac X are two major ones. Here's the Graphic Converter report. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Process: GraphicConverter 11 [2780]
Path: /Applications/GraphicConverter 11.app/Contents/MacOS/GraphicConverter 11
Identifier: com.lemkesoft.graphicconverter11
Version: ???
Code Type: X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process: ??? [1]
Responsible: GraphicConverter 11 [2780]
User ID: 501

Date/Time: 2021-01-01 10:50:52.881 -0500
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.15.7 (19H2)
Report Version: 12
Anonymous UUID: B86E5365-16E7-4770-87CF-B88FF3ED7602

Sleep/Wake UUID: E835ED7A-D3D6-4FD8-9A79-172741F0DE65
Time Awake Since Boot: 27000 seconds
Time Since Wake: 14000 seconds

System Integrity Protection: disabled
Crashed Thread: 0

Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (Code Signature Invalid)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000
Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Termination Reason: Namespace CODESIGNING, Code 0x1
kernel messages:
VM Regions Near 0 (cr2):

-->
__TEXT 0000000103862000-0000000104616000 [ 13.7M] r-x/r-x SM=COW

Thread 0 Crashed:
0 @< # 0x000000010bae3000 _dyld_start + 0
Thread 0 crashed with X86 Thread State (64-bit):
rax: 0x0000000000000000 rbx: 0x0000000000000000 rcx: 0x0000000000000000 rdx: 0x0000000000000000
rdi: 0x0000000000000000 rsi: 0x0000000000000000 rbp: 0x0000000000000000 rsp: 0x00007ffeec39dbb8
r8: 0x0000000000000000 r9: 0x0000000000000000 r10: 0x0000000000000000 r11: 0x0000000000000000
r12: 0x0000000000000000 r13: 0x0000000000000000 r14: 0x0000000000000000 r15: 0x0000000000000000
rip: 0x000000010bae3000 rfl: 0x0000000000000200 cr2: 0x0000000000000000

Logical CPU: 0
Error Code: 0x00000000
Trap Number: 0

Binary Images:
0x103862000 - 0x104615fff +@< # (0) <D5B67FC9-6F94-33BB-AF81-D61CABE53636> @< #
0x10bae2000 - 0x10bb73f47 +@< # (750.6) <1D318D60-C9B0-3511-BE9C-82AFD2EF930D> @< #

External Modification Summary:
Calls made by other processes targeting this process:
task_for_pid: 0
thread_create: 0
thread_set_state: 0
Calls made by this process:
task_for_pid: 0
thread_create: 0
thread_set_state: 0

Calls made by all processes on this machine:
task_for_pid: 14869
thread_create: 0
thread_set_state: 0

VM Region Summary:
ReadOnly portion of Libraries: Total=15.1M resident=0K(0%) swapped_out_or_unallocated=15.1M(100%)
Writable regions: Total=16.1M written=0K(0%) resident=0K(0%) swapped_out=0K(0%) unallocated=16.1M(100%)

VIRTUAL REGION
REGION TYPE SIZE COUNT (non-coalesced)
=========== ======= =======
STACK GUARD 56.0M 1
Stack 8192K 1
__DATA 10.6M 4
__DATA_CONST 20K 1
__LINKEDIT 880K 3

__TEXT 14.3M 2
shared memory 8K 2
=========== ======= =======
TOTAL 89.8M 14

Model: iMac8,1, BootROM IM81.00C1.B00, 2 processors, Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.66 GHz, 6 GB, SMC 1.29f1
Graphics: kHW_ATIr600M76Item, ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro, spdisplays_pcie_device, 256 MB
Memory Module: BANK 0/DIMM0, 2 GB, DDR2 SDRAM, 800 MHz, 0x7F7FFE0000000000, 0x4542453231554538414353412D38472D4520
Memory Module: BANK 1/DIMM1, 4 GB, DDR2 SDRAM, 800 MHz, 0xAD00000000000000, 0x484D50333531533641465238432D53362020
AirPort: spairport_wireless_card_type_airport_extreme (0x14E4, 0x8C), Broadcom BCM43xx 1.0 (5.10.131.36.16)
Bluetooth: Version 7.0.6f7, 3 services, 27 devices, 1 incoming serial ports
Network Service: Ethernet, Ethernet, en0
Network Service: Wi-Fi, AirPort, en1
Serial ATA Device: WDC WD5000AAKS-40YGA1, 500.11 GB
Parallel ATA Device: OPTIARC DVD RW AD-5630A
USB Device: USB 2.0 Bus
USB Device: Hub
USB Device: My Book 1140
USB Device: USB 2.0 Bus
USB Device: Built-in iSight
USB Device: Hub
USB Device: USB Bus
USB Device: USB Bus
USB Device: IR Receiver
USB Device: USB Bus
USB Device: BRCM2046 Hub
USB Device: Bluetooth USB Host Controller
USB Device: USB Bus
USB Device: USB Receiver
USB Device: USB Bus
FireWire Device: unknown_device, Unknown
Thunderbolt Bus:

 

[andre85scarface]

what version of Capture one do you use? I am with 20 and now with 21 no problem. Have you tried reinstalling the soft? Ooops Happy New Year to all fantastic Foru

Version 21 of capture one express fujifilm. Yes I have tried many times but unfortunately it does not open

 

[amstel78]

When booting into recovery from an external drive such as the one created using the DosDude1 installer, why does the Time Machine 'Select a Restore Source' menu show both my internal HFS+ TM drive as well as my APFS SSD boot drive?

Further complicating matters is that if the TM drive is selected and you go into the 'Select Backup' menu screen, the 'Restore From' drop down is grayed out and defaults to the SSD boot drive. This makes a full TM restoration from the TM drive to the boot drive impossible.

I haven't tested this but I'm assuming the only way to perform a full TM restoration from a TM drive to a boot drive would be to format the boot device first so there's nothing on it. Is my assumption correct?

In the meantime, I'm going to look at some other backup and recovery utilities, but would like to get a definitive answer on the above. The behavior of TM in Catalina is far different than that of High Sierra or any Mac OS preceding it.

 

[nacl9163]

Were you ever given the option to do a full volume/disk restore?

MA never got that far. May try again after getting some hints from nice people here, but in truth Catalina is working pretty well and I'm kinda afraid to mess with it lest I have to start again completely from scratch.

 

[amstel78]

When booting into recovery from an external drive such as the one created using the DosDude1 installer, why does the Time Machine 'Select a Restore Source' menu show both my internal HFS+ TM drive as well as my APFS SSD boot drive?

Further complicating matters is that if the TM drive is selected and you go into the 'Select Backup' menu screen, the 'Restore From' drop down is grayed out and defaults to the SSD boot drive. This makes a full TM restoration from the TM drive to the boot drive impossible.

I haven't tested this but I'm assuming the only way to perform a full TM restoration from a TM drive to a boot drive would be to format the boot device first so there's nothing on it. Is my assumption correct?

In the meantime, I'm going to look at some other backup and recovery utilities, but would like to get a definitive answer on the above. The behavior of TM in Catalina is far different than that of High Sierra or any Mac OS preceding it.

Well, I think I figured out what's going on. Since my 2008 3,1 MP can't boot from an APFS drive natively due to Apple not updating the BIOS or firmware, recovery won't allow a TM restore to the boot drive.

I made this connection after trying to boot from a CCC backup and realized that CCC at the beginning of the backup process, reformatted my external USB hard drive using APFS rather than HFS. My Mac did not show the CCC backup drive as being an available choice. To get around this, I used OpenCoreAPFSloader3 on a thumb drive, and voila! My CCC APFS backup volume was visible and bootable.

Now I just have to see if OpenCoreAPFSloader3 can be used to start recovery from my internal boot SSD. If it can, then TM restoration should work the way it was intended.

Just thought I'd post my findings here in case anyone was curious.

Edit: nope. Still can't initiate a TM restore from recovery even if using OpenCoreAPFSloader3. I still get the same error message about not being able to boot from an APFS device. Looks like CCC will have to be the primary backup and recovery tool. Time Machine can be used for small file recovery but that's about it.

 

[KennyW]

Well, I think I figured out what's going on. Since my 2008 3,1 MP can't boot from an APFS drive natively due to Apple not updating the BIOS or firmware, recovery won't allow a TM restore to the boot drive.

I made this connection after trying to boot from a CCC backup and realized that CCC at the beginning of the backup process, reformatted my external USB hard drive using APFS rather than HFS. My Mac did not show the CCC backup drive as being an available choice. To get around this, I used OpenCoreAPFSloader3 on a thumb drive, and voila! My CCC APFS backup volume was visible and bootable.

Now I just have to see if OpenCoreAPFSloader3 can be used to start recovery from my internal boot SSD. If it can, then TM restoration should work the way it was intended.

Just thought I'd post my findings here in case anyone was curious.

Edit: nope. Still can't initiate a TM restore from recovery even if using OpenCoreAPFSloader3. I still get the same error message about not being able to boot from an APFS device. Looks like CCC will have to be the primary backup and recovery tool. Time Machine can be used for small file recovery but that's about it.

if you search in this thread, you would have seen many prior posts on Time Machine failing to work in Catalina on supported Macs. I haven't seen any clear solution to that yet. And CCC would be the best tool currently for complete volume or incremental backup to an external.

 

[amstel78]

if you search in this thread, you would have seen many prior posts on Time Machine failing to work in Catalina on supported Macs. I haven't seen any clear solution to that yet. And CCC would be the best tool currently for complete volume or incremental backup to an external.

I'll do a bit more searching but from what I've seen thus far, the issues most are complaining about revolve around incredibly slow TM backups (especially after an upgrade). I haven't come across a scenario similar to mine about full restoration from an internal TM drive to boot volume on a Mac not designed to use APFS drives natively.

Interestingly, I've used TM in several occasions now to restore files that were deleted. That worked just fine. That said, having a TM backup isn't a complete waste on an unsupported Mac running Catalina if it'd be used solely for that purpose.

And yes, agreed on CCC. I'm using it now and recently created a bootable recovery drive that can be used in cases of emergency.

 

[joevt]

Well, I think I figured out what's going on. Since my 2008 3,1 MP can't boot from an APFS drive natively due to Apple not updating the BIOS or firmware, recovery won't allow a TM restore to the boot drive.

I made this connection after trying to boot from a CCC backup and realized that CCC at the beginning of the backup process, reformatted my external USB hard drive using APFS rather than HFS. My Mac did not show the CCC backup drive as being an available choice. To get around this, I used OpenCoreAPFSloader3 on a thumb drive, and voila! My CCC APFS backup volume was visible and bootable.

Now I just have to see if OpenCoreAPFSloader3 can be used to start recovery from my internal boot SSD. If it can, then TM restoration should work the way it was intended.

Just thought I'd post my findings here in case anyone was curious.

Edit: nope. Still can't initiate a TM restore from recovery even if using OpenCoreAPFSloader3. I still get the same error message about not being able to boot from an APFS device. Looks like CCC will have to be the primary backup and recovery tool. Time Machine can be used for small file recovery but that's about it.

Try using the Driver#### nvram variables to load the APFS driver? It's the next best thing to installing the driver into firmware. #86

 

[Bangradio]

Hi there! I just installed the dosdude patcher, thanks Btw for helping out with that.

When I move the windows, the display glitches and creates the windows to sorta delay graphically, looking like many windows following the cursor. Then I have to wait about 2 minutes to possibly see the window correctly.

Does anyone else have this problem?

 

[0134168]

Hi there! I just installed the dosdude patcher, thanks Btw for helping out with that.

When I move the windows, the display glitches and creates the windows to sorta delay graphically, looking like many windows following the cursor. Then I have to wait about 2 minutes to possibly see the window correctly.

Does anyone else have this problem?

Please, write always the model of mac you are talking about.