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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.
Petri Krohn said:
Continuity and Catalina on 2007 iMac 7,1

This project started when I found a 20 inch 2007 iMac in a dumpster. I added some RAM and installed El Capitan and gave it to my iPhone-loving cousin.

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The 20 inch iMac was the top model with a 2.4 GHz CPU and a Radeon HD 2600 Pro. Unfortunately the dumpster had scratched the glass. Instead of searching for a replacement glass I bought a 24 inch iMac with a failing GPU for 30 euros. The plan was to swap the good GPU from the 20 inch iMac to the 24 inch iMac.

I first updated the firmware for APFS booting using Dosdude1's APFS ROM Patcher. I also prepared a clean install of El Capitan on an SSD on my Mac Pro. (Unfortunately I forgot to enable remote desktop.)

I had ordered a Core 2 Duo T9300 CPU to enable the Mac to run Catalina. I used some old Arctic Silver 3 on the CPU and the GPU. For the GPU ram I reused the white silicon paste. The GPU on the 24 inch IMac had been running much hotter than in the 20 inch iMac, deteriorating the black rubber foam and leaving sandy black dust inside the Mac.

View attachment 925984
View attachment 925986

I had considered just swapping the whole logic board, but once inside I noticed that the 24 inch logic board is larger. The only electronic difference seems to be that there are unused extra pins in the MXM connector in the 24 inch model.
I placed the 120 GB SSD in a plastic 3.5 inch adapter I had ordered from eBay for $15. I moved the thermal sensor to the new drive and used the original fasteners to attach the drive.

View attachment 925989

The most difficult part in reassembly was attaching the inverter cable to the power supply. I had to unscrew the PSU from the case to get the cable in place, then screw it back in place with one hand. Despite this I failed on the first attempt. When I restarted the iMac the display stayed black. I could hear the boot chime and all four status LEDs lit up. Unfortunately I had not enabled any form of sharing, so the Mac did not show up on my network. After some experimenting I did manage to put the Mac to sleep, so I knew the backlight was the issue. Also LEDs 3 and 4 indicated that the GPU was on and communicating with the LCD.

After removing and reattaching the LCD I got the iMac to boot into El Capitan. As the aluminum bezel was still missing, the WiFi and USB cards were exposed. I tried the BCM94331CD card and adapter I had ordered from AliExpress from my Mac Pro 3,1 for $13.99. Turns out the miniPCIe slot on the iMac has the needed USB connection. (For some reason the adapter in question failed to work on the Mac Pro, preventing the Mac from even booting or chiming. On the iMac it works fine.)

View attachment 925993

At first the Bluetooth function on BCM94331CD card did not show up on the System Profiler. After I removed the original BT card it showed up. I then ran Continuity Activation Tool on El Capitan to check that everything worked. I had trouble securing the BCM94331CD card as the only screw hole on the adapter was on the wrong side. I ended up securing a bag sealer to the single stud, hoping that the bezel would put additional pressure on the card.

View attachment 925995

I did a clean install of Catalina using Dosdude1's Catalina patcher. Some minor issues emerged. It was not possible to manually select the patches before the installation. The installer applied the APFS boot patch and the legacy WiFi patch which are unneeded in my system but are part of the default list for the iMac 7,1. Also I ended up without a recovery partition.

View attachment 925996

On Catalina I tried to run Continuity Activation tool again. The script failed to start. I then followed instructions I found on Reddit: I opened the package contents and ran the included script file directly from the terminal. System Preferences under "General" now shows that "Handoff" is available and activated.

View attachment 925997

The iMac already had 4 GB of ram. I found El Capitan on a HDD to be extremely sluggish with constant beachballing. Catalina on an SSD seems usable, but it still shows an occasional beachball. My 4-core Mac Pro 3,1 with technology from the same generation works noticeable better. The 4 GB of ram should not be the limiting factor as many modern Macbook Pros and Airs came with 4 GB of non-upgradable ram soldered on. The weakest link may be the GPU. It takes several seconds for all windows to show up after login. Evidently there is still room for upgrades and improvement!

View attachment 925999
Click to expand...

Have you happened to find a better GPU for the 2007 iMac, by chance?
 
K two said:
Happy w/19H1217 DO NOT install ALL of the updates. Software Update CP will offer some choices, if you don't want them opt-out of Betas, the small blue text below the CP gear is the option. After opting-out, re-run SilentKnight it will offer MRT and X-Protect, only. You can update both. MRT may require two attempts. How does the cMB5,1 perform on Catalina? We have one on Mojave, see the signature, last entry. 😎
Click to expand...
Thanks, MRT and X-Protect updates went fine - still happy w/19H1217. After updating the first restart was slower than usual but now everything works smooth. This 2008 MB5,1 2.4GHz with SSD and 8Gb is perfect for me - I habe been Catalina since almost the beginning of Dosdude1's patcher and never had an issue so far (I usually do not use betas even if I am confident they would also work flawless).
 
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Any one has link to standalone latest Safari 14.1.2 dmg file for Catalina/Mojave.
 
Hello, maybe someone can help. Just installed Catalina on a MAC 3,1 and it runs ok..a little laggy and VLC does not work. (running a ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256 MB) would an updated card resolve this issue? Also I wanted to go back to the boot menu to select a different drive and I can't get to it. I hold option and it just restarts to Catalina. Could I make a new apfs volume (using the same drive Catalina is on and install mojave and switch between the two?

Thank You for any help.
 
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JoeRalat said:
Hello, maybe someone can help. Just installed Catalina on a MAC 3,1 and it runs ok..a little laggy and VLC does not work. (running a ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256 MB) would an updated card resolve this issue? Also I wanted to go back to the boot menu to select a different drive and I can't get to it. I hold option and it just restarts to Catalina. Could I make a new apfs volume (using the same drive Catalina is on and install mojave and switch between the two?

Thank You for any help.
Click to expand...
You'll need to set separate partition for each OS. Multi-boot is a common set-up.👀
 
JoeRalat said:
What is the best way to uninstall Catalina from a mac pro 3,1?
Click to expand...
Erase the partition. Remove the disk. Or leave it alone and install a new OS to a different partition. My MacPro3,1 has like 30 boot partitions...

I guess you'll want to clean up the EFI partition if the APFS driver was not added to your ROM. Is there a startup.nsh, bootx64.efi, apfs.efi file in your EFI partition? You could leave them there, just use Startup Disk preferences panel to select a new default boot option so that bootx64.efi (which is a copy of the EFI Shell) doesn't boot anymore.
 
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Anybody here also having problems with Permissions (Settings--> Security & Privacy--> Privacy)?
All my apps that normally would ask for permission to access calendar, Reminders or Input Monitoring do not appear in that list and I am not able to add anything manually...
For other people on a "normal" MacOS Catalina this seems to work as expected, but not here. And those apps also work normally on my Big Sur mac.

First I thought it is a problem with those apps. But after having 4 apps now that do not work properly because they don't get the rights they need, I realize it is a problem with my system!

Thanks
 
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kosiko said:
Anybody here also having problems with Permissions (Settings--> Security & Privacy--> Privacy)?
All my apps that normally would ask for permission to access calendar, Reminders or Input Monitoring do not appear in that list and I am not able to add anything manually...
For other people on a "normal" MacOS Catalina this seems to work as expected, but not here. And those apps also work normally on my Big Sur mac.

First I thought it is a problem with those apps. But after having 4 apps now that do not work properly because they don't get the rights they need, I realize it is a problem with my system!

Thanks
Click to expand...
I faced the same problem, and thanks to K Two's excellent advice, I was able to solve it.
The solution might be "Tccplus", check out the original advice in K Two's post here:
#14,259
 
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kosiko said:
Anybody here also having problems with Permissions (Settings--> Security & Privacy--> Privacy)?
All my apps that normally would ask for permission to access calendar, Reminders or Input Monitoring do not appear in that list and I am not able to add anything manually...
For other people on a "normal" MacOS Catalina this seems to work as expected, but not here. And those apps also work normally on my Big Sur mac.

First I thought it is a problem with those apps. But after having 4 apps now that do not work properly because they don't get the rights they need, I realize it is a problem with my system!

Thanks
Click to expand...
 
joevt said:
Erase the partition. Remove the disk. Or leave it alone and install a new OS to a different partition. My MacPro3,1 has like 30 boot partitions...

I guess you'll want to clean up the EFI partition if the APFS driver was not added to your ROM. Is there a startup.nsh, bootx64.efi, apfs.efi file in your EFI partition? You could leave them there, just use Startup Disk preferences panel to select a new default boot option so that bootx64.efi (which is a copy of the EFI Shell) doesn't boot anymore.
Click to expand...
I would like to keep catalina and install mojave on a new volume. Not sure if thats possible. Not sure about the EFI stuff. I just used dosdude install instructions and tools. If I can't install mojave on a new volume, then I would like to wipe out the drive that Catalina is on and install mojave. Again can't seem to get in to the bootmenu when I restart the computer and hit option.
 
Thanks a lot to all of you.
Catalina 19H1323.png
 
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I just upgraded my dads old MacBook Pro 15” Mid 2009 Just to play around with and I successfully reformatted and first upgraded to Mojave then aftwards reformatted and upgraded to Catalina. Although it little slow its working fine. It got SSD and I just upgraded from 4GB RAM to 8GB but only 6GB is usable on this machine.

My question is is it possible to force the dGPU 9600M GT? These old machines requires logout before switching but that doesn’t do anything. I think I read somewhere Apple removed the API’s in the newer versions of MacOS or something for these older models to work with graphics switch?

EDIT: Hmm, i tried gSwitch 1.9.7 and it seems like it made the switch to the 9600M GT Now. So it seems like its working

EDIT 2: IT could also because I ran sudo pmset -a gpuswitch 1
 
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For the last week or so i have a boot issue, after installing the patch that Software update recommended before the 2 Safari updates -
Whenever i restart (doesn´t matter if normal or + smc reset/PRAM Reset ) the mac wont boot. It always stops halfway trough loading the login screen and i have to restart in Safety Mode.
And if i just login in Safety and then restart - it always suddenly works in normal on the first try.

What i tried so far is:
SMC Reset / Pram Reset / First Aid Disc Utility/Deactivating all login items / Onyx
but so far nothing worked :(

Hope some wizard can help me here ^^
Regards
 
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QueenEv1l said:
For the last week or so i have a boot issue, after installing the patch that Software update recommended before the 2 Safari updates -
Whenever i restart (doesn´t matter if normal or + smc reset/PRAM Reset ) the mac wont boot. It always stops halfway trough loading the login screen and i have to restart in Safety Mode.
And if i just login in Safety and then restart - it always suddenly works in normal on the first try.

What i tried so far is:
SMC Reset / Pram Reset / First Aid Disc Utility/Deactivating all login items / Onyx
but so far nothing worked :(

Hope some wizard can help me here ^^
Regards
Click to expand...
Suggest you format your drive and do a clean install. Perhaps your OS has got corrupted.
 
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QueenEv1l said:
For the last week or so i have a boot issue, after installing the patch that Software update recommended before the 2 Safari updates -
Whenever i restart (doesn´t matter if normal or + smc reset/PRAM Reset ) the mac wont boot. It always stops halfway trough loading the login screen and i have to restart in Safety Mode.
And if i just login in Safety and then restart - it always suddenly works in normal on the first try.

What i tried so far is:
SMC Reset / Pram Reset / First Aid Disc Utility/Deactivating all login items / Onyx
but so far nothing worked :(

Hope some wizard can help me here ^^
Regards
Click to expand...
Reinstall the Catalina patches from USB w/Force Cache Rebuild.

What Mac - is good for us to know?
 
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QueenEv1l said:
For the last week or so i have a boot issue, after installing the patch that Software update recommended before the 2 Safari updates -
Whenever i restart (doesn´t matter if normal or + smc reset/PRAM Reset ) the mac wont boot. It always stops halfway trough loading the login screen and i have to restart in Safety Mode.
And if i just login in Safety and then restart - it always suddenly works in normal on the first try.

What i tried so far is:
SMC Reset / Pram Reset / First Aid Disc Utility/Deactivating all login items / Onyx
but so far nothing worked :(

Hope some wizard can help me here ^^
Regards
Click to expand...
I would first try K two’s advice , and if that doesn’t work, then try Dilli’s advice.
 
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