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macOS 10.15 Catalina on Unsupported Macs

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Squatting Hen

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Jan 12, 2022
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Thanks everyone. I did have High Sierra and Windows 10 (had to use Windows 7 disk then update to 10) working perfectly then I did Catalina.

What is the difference of doing a partition vs a volume? Would I still use options to choose where to boot at startup?

So I would need to clear the partitions, back to just one with high Sierra. Install Windows like I did previously on a separate partition. Then create a volume for Catalina.

I am not in front of it now, but I remember when I installed Catalina I had to change the partition “type” to something like APFS. Can I change the volume to APFS and not the entire partition? Would doing that mess with the entire partition just the volume?
 
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TimmuJapan

TimmuJapan

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Jul 7, 2020
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Squatting Hen said:
What is the difference of doing a partition vs a volume?
Click to expand...
You can install another macOS on a separate volume without having to create a new partition. It is a handy macOS feature.

Squatting Hen said:
Would I still use options to choose where to boot at startup?
Click to expand...
Yes. See Attached.

Squatting Hen said:
So I would need to clear the partitions, back to just one with high Sierra. Install Windows like I did previously on a separate partition. Then create a volume for Catalina.
Click to expand...
You could start from the beginning, and that order should work.

Squatting Hen said:
I am not in front of it now, but I remember when I installed Catalina I had to change the partition “type” to something like afps. I know that not the right name, but would doing that mess with the entire partition just the volume?
Click to expand...
Format the entire drive as APFS before you install High Sierra. I hope that you have an SSD in that iMac instead of an HDD. It's going to be really slow otherwise. Inside your APFS container, you can create an extra volume for Catalina. When you install Catalina, it will create another volume automatically called "Catalina - Data," and that is just the way Catalina organizes itself.

See attached.... EasyPeasyTimmuJapaneasy
 

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K two

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TimmuJapan said:
You can install another macOS on a separate volume without having to create a new partition. It is a handy macOS feature.


Yes. See Attached.


You could start from the beginning, and that order should work.


Format the entire drive as APFS before you install High Sierra. I hope that you have an SSD in that iMac instead of an HDD. It's going to be really slow otherwise. Inside your APFS container, you can create an extra volume for Catalina. When you install Catalina, it will create another volume automatically called "Catalina - Data," and that is just the way Catalina organizes itself.

See attached.... EasyPeasyTimmuJapaneasy
Click to expand...
'09 iMac may require the bootROM to be patched to boot anything past El Cap. Or . . . the use of some form of OpenCore on USB to get this all to work? No 3rd party items get onto the iMac that way.
 
TimmuJapan

TimmuJapan

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K two said:
'09 iMac may require the bootROM to be patched to boot anything past El Cap. Or . . . the use of some form of OpenCore to get this all to work?
Click to expand...
K Two is a big opencore fan, and lucky for us, he is very knowledgeable about it and can give good advice about opencore.??? I use opencore too for my hackintosh, and my legacy macs will get the opencore legacy patcher treatment after Catalina losses support....

"Squatting Hen" was able to install dosdude1 patched Catalina on his 2009 iMac. The problem was that adding a 3rd partition for DosDude1 Catalina broke his windows partition`s ability to boot... Many/Most/All? macs with a partition for windows will become unbootable if yet another partition is added to the drive.

I think that Squatting Hen is going to reformat his/her drive and just install Catalina on a separate volume this time. That should work.

K Two - have you tried booting windows 10 on a separate partition alongside Monterey or Big Sur via opencore? Even with opencore managing the bootable OSes, a user might have to use gdisk to get windows booting again if the drive has too many partitions. When you multi-boot your devices with opencore, is each macOS on a separate volume or separate partition? How do you organize it?
 
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K two

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TimmuJapan said:
K Two is a big opencore fan, and lucky for us, he is very knowledgeable about it and can give good advice about opencore.??? I use opencore too for my hackintosh, and my legacy macs will get the opencore legacy patcher treatment after Catalina losses support....

"Squatting Hen" was able to install dosdude1 patched Catalina on his 2009 iMac. The problem was that adding a 3rd partition for DosDude1 Catalina broke his windows partition`s ability to boot... Many/Most/All? macs with a partition for windows will become unbootable if yet another partition is added to the drive.

I think that Squatting Hen is going to reformat his/her drive and just install Catalina on a separate volume this time. That should work.

K Two - have you tried booting windows 10 on a separate partition alongside Monterey or Big Sur via opencore? Even with opencore managing the bootable OSes, a user might have to use gdisk to get windows booting again if the drive has too many partitions. When you multi-boot your devices with opencore, is each macOS on a separate volume or separate partition? How do you organize it?
Click to expand...
The dosdude patchers install the APFS Patch to get Catalina to run. May be a problem for the gdisk approach? ?‍♂️
 
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TimmuJapan

TimmuJapan

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K two said:
The dosdude patchers install the APFS Patch to get Catalina to run. May be a problem for the gdisk approach? ?‍♂️
Click to expand...

Nope, I used dosdude1 installs in conjunction with gdisk when multi-booting. Gdisk has alwasy recovered the the windows install for me after adding another partition that breaks windows ability to boot.

K two - are all of your multiboots macOSes on separate volumes or separate partitions or a combination? I think that macOS will accept as many partitions as you want, but in my experience, windows 10 will break as soon as another partition is added and can only be recovered with something like gdisk.

It looks like you have so many macOSes on one drive from your signature. Are all of your multiboot macOSes on separate volumes or separate partitions or a combination?
 
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TimmuJapan said:
Nope, I used dosdude1 installs in conjunction with gdisk when multi-booting. Gdisk has alwasy recovered the the windows install for me after adding another partition that breaks windows ability to boot.

K two - are all of your multiboots macOSes on separate volumes or separate partitions or a combination? I think that macOS will accept as many partitions as you want, but in my experience, windows 10 will break as soon as another partition is added and can only be recovered with something like gdisk.

It looks like you have so many macOSes on one drive from your signature. Are all of your multiboot macOSes on separate volumes or separate partitions or a combination?
Click to expand...
Each macOS is on a separate partition. Mini is reconfiged a server no CD-R, 2 drives, 1TB ea. one SSHDD, the other SSD - Catalina (latest on both). :cool:
 
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SU2022-001 OTA via CatalinaOTAswufix, OC and Catalina Patcher v.1.4.4. Also needed Device Support Update and both X-Protect and MRT updates and the Validation Patch. ? Runs as expected.

H1713.jpg
 
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K two

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Hack5190 said:
Updated my 3.1 to 19H1713 and Safari to 15.3 (15612.4.9.1.7, 15612) using only CatalinaOTAswufix and Dosdue1's Catalina patcher.

Running great!
Click to expand...
Because your bootROM boots APFS, this Mini does not. So OC is necessary. If you run the Patch Updater and SilentKnight you will see the other updates.
 
S

Squatting Hen

macrumors newbie
Jan 12, 2022
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I have been stuck this morning trying to get my partitions back to 1. I can’t seem to get that to happen. If you all can help, let me know what you need. Thank you.

I already erased the drives except for high Sierra so I could still boot and make the changes. I can’t get the VM drive to combine to high Sierra or the free space part to go to high Sierra.

When I try to combine the free space to high Sierra I get an error that says, “internal error occurred and the disk for one of the specified operations could not be found”

Right now I am just trying to get one drive as APFS so I can get fresh installs.

Can’t get rid of the partitions.
 

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Squatting Hen

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Jan 12, 2022
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This 200GB partition with the blue lines seems like a ghost partition. My drive is only 1TB but the total here adds up to 1.2
 

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jowaju

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Mar 7, 2019
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Hack5190 said:
Updated my 3.1 to 19H1713 and Safari to 15.3 (15612.4.9.1.7, 15612) using only CatalinaOTAswufix and Dosdue1's Catalina patcher.

Running great!
Click to expand...

I updated 2 2011 13” MacBook Air 4,2’s today via OTA without having to use CatalinaOTAswufix. Used OCLP on an external device to boot, let the update run and then reboot to DosDude USB to repatch. After removing OCLP drive no trace remains, unit boots normally to 19H1713 unassisted and all hardware seems to be working and stable.
 
Ausdauersportler

Ausdauersportler

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Nov 25, 2019
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TimmuJapan said:
"Squatting Hen" is on a 2009 iMac. (wtf? that sounds weird - and I can't believe that I found a picture to go with this post!) LOL

I don`t think that a UEFI install of windows 10 will be successful on this machine. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8080187

It doesn' matter if he goes through bootcamp or not. Macs prior to 2012 need legacy installs of windows 10 to get all the drivers working.....and all sorts of other tweaking too....Hrutkay Mods has made multiple videos about how to get windows 10 on unsupported Macs. Here is a good place to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSkM2zOquCo

I tried UEFI windows 10 on my MBP 2011, and I couldnt get the sound to work. Finally, it worked with a legacy install of windows 10 made by Hrutkay mods in the comment of the video above. Greg (Hrutkay Mods' boss) used to write a lot on these forums and did several collaborations with DosDude1, per my knowledge.
Click to expand...
UEFI Windows 10 runs on 2011 (i)Macs using OpenCore to enable sound. The hack is quite easy and already included into OCLP.
 
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TimmuJapan

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Ausdauersportler said:
UEFI Windows 10 runs on 2011 (i)Macs using OpenCore to enable sound. The hack is quite easy and already included into OCLP.
Click to expand...
That’s awesome! I didn’t know that. But this might not be the best route for a user who wants dosdude1 Catalina + windows10 on their machine? If a user wants big sur or Monterey plus windows 10, I think what you point to looks like a great option.
 
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Squatting Hen

macrumors newbie
Jan 12, 2022
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Trying boot camp for the install….hopefully it goes through.

Hung up on a completely black screen after Windows installs. Went through the entire install process and when Windows was starting up at the end, screen is all black.
 
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internetzel

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Apr 29, 2015
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An UEFI install of Windows 10 works great on my late 2009 iMac 11,1 (nearly identical to the 2010 iMacs) - better than a Bootcamp install in fact, since that way one can install AHCI SATA drivers which should give better performance (especially with SSD drives) than the legacy drivers which have to be used with Bootcamp.

But there's one requirement for being able to use a UEFI Windows on such machines - you need to have a third party replacement GPU installed or Windows will hang upon installing and/or launching the AMD graphics drivers. That happened with my now broken 4850 card.
 
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internetzel

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Now something related to Catalina:
Since applying the update to 19H1713 the Software Update control panel as well as the softwareupdate command line tool cannot finish searching for updates, they're just searching infinitely.

Does anyone else experience that behaviour?
 
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K two

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internetzel said:
Now something related to Catalina:
Since applying the update to 19H1713 the Software Update control panel as well as the softwareupdate command line tool cannot finish searching for updates, they're just searching infinitely.

Does anyone else experience that behaviour?
Click to expand...
Must be a local problem. All good here. :cool:

19H1713 ok.jpg
 
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Squatting Hen

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Jan 12, 2022
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I had High Sierra and Windows 10 installed, and working perfectly. Added Catalina, and I couldn’t boot into Windows any longer. TimmuJapan, and others, have been helpful. TimmuJapan mentioned that having three partitions on Mac can cause issues with Windows.

Since I had just picked up this iMac, I didn’t have much on it, I decided to clean install High Sierra on APFS to use Catalina as a volume instead of a partition, and add Windows as a partition. I couldn’t get Windows installed that way. I would get a black screen after the install.

So now I am trying from scratch, adding High Sierra back on with the HD set back to MacOS Extended Journaled. We will see if that works. But I would be back in the same boat as having three partitions. Unless the APFS has something to do with breaking Windows.

Ideally I would be happy with Catalina and Windows. This would allow me both options and I could retire my older Windows PC.
 
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