macOS 11 Big Sur on Unsupported Macs Thread

[Barry K. Nathan]

I did as you advised me , but ended up with these message.
and for your information. I did upgrade in the same drive of Catalina (SSD) , I haven’t erased the drive.

Would you mind running this command and letting me know what the output is? There might be a bug in the patcher and this might help me fix it. (It's probably not related to your original problem, but the more bugs I fix, the better. )

nvram csr-active-config

My best guess about your original problem is that the Big Sur installer somehow failed to fully remove the Catalina Legacy GPU patch. If you have a Time Machine backup of Catalina (or a similar backup, like a Carbon Copy Cloner backup or SuperDuper backup), you could use that backup to go back to Catalina for now.

If you don't have a Time Machine backup of Catalina, then I'm going to need some time (possibly several days, maybe even a full week) to figure out the best way to fix your problem, but if you have valuable data on your Big Sur drive, then you might want to make a Time Machine backup of it in the meantime. (I am going to investigate this in any case -- this sounds like a problem that could hit me a few months from now.)

 

[eminemmm]

Would you mind running this command and letting me know what the output is? There might be a bug in the patcher and this might help me fix it. (It's probably not related to your original problem, but the more bugs I fix, the better. )

nvram csr-active-config

My best guess about your original problem is that the Big Sur installer somehow failed to fully remove the Catalina Legacy GPU patch. If you have a Time Machine backup of Catalina (or a similar backup, like a Carbon Copy Cloner backup or SuperDuper backup), you could use that backup to go back to Catalina for now.

If you don't have a Time Machine backup of Catalina, then I'm going to need some time (possibly several days, maybe even a full week) to figure out the best way to fix your problem, but if you have valuable data on your Big Sur drive, then you might want to make a Time Machine backup of it in the meantime. (I am going to investigate this in any case -- this sounds like a problem that could hit me a few months from now.)

i did the nvram csr-active-config

and sadly I don’t want to go back to Catalina . i have long time ago time machine backup and I use my only MacBook Pro and I have a lot of stuff I don’t want to lose anyway , I could wait and I could try the possible solutions a long with you , amen thank you in advance

 

[jackluke]

I tried USBopencoreAPFSloader4S, but I can't boot with it on my MBP9,1. I have this no parking sign.

That means BootKernelExtensions.kc isn't pointing to the Preboot or to the right boot.efi , booting BigSur outside of opencore, from terminal try this to fix it:

sudo bless --folder /System/Volumes/Preboot/*/System/Library/CoreServices --bootefi /System/Volumes/Preboot/*/System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi --label BigSur

but boot.efi should be the stock apple BigSur one, if it's a patched one I guess my customized USBopencore setup won't boot.

 

[Barry K. Nathan]

i did the nvram csr-active-config

and sadly I don’t want to go back to Catalina . i have long time ago time machine backup and I use my only MacBook Pro and I have a lot of stuff I don’t want to lose anyway , I could wait and I could try the possible solutions a long with you , amen thank you in advance

The output shown in that screenshot is literally an impossible scenario. (I'm not saying you faked it or anything. Keep reading.) I've highlighted two portions of that screenshot.

In order for the screenshot to depict a scenario that's not impossible, the "8" in the lower red rectangle would have to be a "9", or the "disabled" in the upper red rectangle would have to be "enabled".

So, somewhere in the hardware, something is randomly flipping a 0 bit into a 1 bit, or a 1 bit into a 0 bit.

In other words, either your RAM or your logic board is toast. My experience with the Early 2011s is that it's most likely the RAM; I imagine the same is true of the late 2011s.

 

[eminemmm]

The output shown in that screenshot is literally an impossible scenario. (I'm not saying you faked it or anything. Keep reading.) I've highlighted two portions of that screenshot.

In order for the screenshot to depict a scenario that's not impossible, the "8" in the lower red rectangle would have to be a "9", or the "disabled" in the upper red rectangle would have to be "enabled".

So, somewhere in the hardware, something is randomly flipping a 0 bit into a 1 bit, or a 1 bit into a 0 bit.

In other words, either your RAM or your logic board is toast. My experience with the Early 2011s is that it's most likely the RAM; I imagine the same is true of the late 2011s.

so what do you think the reason? My MBP is costumed with SSD drive instead of the disk drive and loaded of 16 GB ram into two slots,
any possible terminal orders I can do ?

 

[eminemmm]

The output shown in that screenshot is literally an impossible scenario. (I'm not saying you faked it or anything. Keep reading.) I've highlighted two portions of that screenshot.

In order for the screenshot to depict a scenario that's not impossible, the "8" in the lower red rectangle would have to be a "9", or the "disabled" in the upper red rectangle would have to be "enabled".

So, somewhere in the hardware, something is randomly flipping a 0 bit into a 1 bit, or a 1 bit into a 0 bit.

In other words, either your RAM or your logic board is toast. My experience with the Early 2011s is that it's most likely the RAM; I imagine the same is true of the late 2011s.

Anyway I am remaking a Catalina usb bootable drive with Dosdude patcher maybe I will downgrade again to Catalina.

 

[Barry K. Nathan]

so what do you think the reason? My MBP is costumed with SSD drive instead of the disk drive and loaded of 16 GB ram into two slots,
any possible terminal orders I can do ?

If you have an Apple battery (as opposed to a 3rd-party battery), you can hold down Option-D while booting to start Apple Hardware Test. First run the standard test (it might take 10-15 minutes), and if that says "no trouble found", run the extended test (which could possibly take 3-4 hours if I remember correctly). (AHT isn't the best RAM test -- there are others, like memtest86+ -- but my experience is that it's still pretty good, and it's easy to boot up and also tests things besides RAM.) (If you have a 3rd-party battery, the test will quickly fail with a false positive on the battery.)

I'll reiterate: I think there is something wrong with your MacBook Pro's RAM.

 

[eminemmm]

If you have an Apple battery (as opposed to a 3rd-party battery), you can hold down Option-D while booting to start Apple Hardware Test. First run the standard test (it might take 10-15 minutes), and if that says "no trouble found", run the extended test (which could possibly take 3-4 hours if I remember correctly). (AHT isn't the best RAM test -- there are others, like memtest86+ -- but my experience is that it's still pretty good, and it's easy to boot up and also tests things besides RAM.) (If you have a 3rd-party battery, the test will quickly fail with a false positive on the battery.)

I'll reiterate: I think there is something wrong with your MacBook Pro's RAM.

I replaced my battery not long time ago , because my original battery (stilll good) but seems to be swollen and affected my touchpad the left click (this is why I changed )

and my ram is 8GB X 2 Kingston (I guess they are good and expensive )

(you mean I can’t test the hardware with battery replacement

 

[Barry K. Nathan]

I replaced my battery not long time ago , because my original battery (stilll good) but seems to be swollen and affected my touchpad the left click (this is why I changed )

and my ram is 8GB X 2 Kingston (I guess they are good and expensive )

(you mean I can’t test the hardware with battery replacement

You can try running Apple Hardware Test, but it will probably fail quickly with a false positive error on the battery. It would only take a few minutes to give it a try, though. (Generally it works if Apple replaced the battery but it fails if it's a non-Apple battery.) I just remembered, if you disconnect the battery from the logic board, Apple Hardware Test might run OK.

Any brand of RAM can fail. (The MacBook Pro I'm typing this on had Crucial RAM fail in it.) If it's Kingston RAM that has failed, I would expect that it's still under warranty. (It's also possible that the RAM is OK but that there is a logic board problem. That would be a more expensive problem.)

Maybe memtest86+ would be a better program to use than Apple Hardware Test. I feel like I should be giving basic instructions, but I'm too tired now. Maybe after I have a nap (if another MacRumors forum member doesn't do it in the meantime).

 

[eminemmm]

You can try running Apple Hardware Test, but it will probably fail quickly with a false positive error on the battery. It would only take a few minutes to give it a try, though. (Generally it works if Apple replaced the battery but it fails if it's a non-Apple battery.) I just remembered, if you disconnect the battery from the logic board, Apple Hardware Test might run OK.

Any brand of RAM can fail. (The MacBook Pro I'm typing this on had Crucial RAM fail in it.) If it's Kingston RAM that has failed, I would expect that it's still under warranty. (It's also possible that the RAM is OK but that there is a logic board problem. That would be a more expensive problem.)

Maybe memtest86+ would be a better program to use than Apple Hardware Test. I feel like I should be giving basic instructions, but I'm too tired now. Maybe after I have a nap (if another MacRumors forum member doesn't do it in the meantime).

but why do you think it would be something wrong with ram , I’ve been working fine on Catalina even though not perfect but I wasn’t annoyed at all

and I don’t think I would openthe MacBook Pro from inside at the moment

,ummm and what about the logic board ? Could it be broken !
Anyway thank you really for your concern
Maybe we can continue tomorrow I’m also tired and it’s 00:30 and will sleep soon.
Maybe also I will need your experience if I’m going to buy an used MacBook Pro or Mac Pro.

 

[Barry K. Nathan]

but why do you think it would be something wrong with ram , I’ve been working fine on Catalina even though not perfect but I wasn’t annoyed at all

and I don’t think I would openthe MacBook Pro from inside at the moment

,ummm and what about the logic board ? Could it be broken !
Anyway thank you really for your concern
Maybe we can continue tomorrow I’m also tired and it’s 00:30 and will sleep soon.
Maybe also I will need your experience if I’m going to buy an used MacBook Pro or Mac Pro.

Just to quickly answer your question (you can wait until tomorrow to read this post if you want), the sequence in your last screenshot (the patch-kexts error -- actually coming from csrutil for the most part -- followed by the nvram csr-active-config output) is mathematically impossible on a Mac with properly working RAM, CPU and logic board. The most likely scenario is that a bit in RAM malfunctioned while either csrutil or nvram was running. (A bad connection between the RAM and logic board, because of a logic board problem, would have the same effect.)

 

[ASentientBot]

The output shown in that screenshot is literally an impossible scenario. (I'm not saying you faked it or anything. Keep reading.) I've highlighted two portions of that screenshot.

In order for the screenshot to depict a scenario that's not impossible, the "8" in the lower red rectangle would have to be a "9", or the "disabled" in the upper red rectangle would have to be "enabled".

So, somewhere in the hardware, something is randomly flipping a 0 bit into a 1 bit, or a 1 bit into a 0 bit.

In other words, either your RAM or your logic board is toast. My experience with the Early 2011s is that it's most likely the RAM; I imagine the same is true of the late 2011s.

I very much doubt this conclusion. A RAM issue of that magnitude would result in non-booting system for sure. What is the chance that a single bit would get flipped there, but nothing else would break? Much more likely is that @eminemmm is using a patched boot.efi or has some other modified/corrupted system file.

Or, something is happening which we don't understand, like an undocumented boot-arg or change in the SIP flags. Apple and macOS are complex beasts. We think we're smart, but we only scratch the surface... tons of things we take for granted could have been altered.

Assuming a RAM failure from that one oddity is a huge jump.

 

[ASentientBot]

A small update regarding the DP7 mystery.

The asset zipfiles that can be obtained via this method are identical in structure to those inside the SharedSupport.dmg from the regular InstallAssistant apps. We initially tried directly swapping them into SharedSupport, but that proved to be difficult since it's a "pkgdmg" -- an undocumented xar/pkg/dmg hybrid that's simultaneously a valid package and disk image. The hdiutil make-writable-swap-make-readonly roundtrip inevitably made SharedSupport.dmg into a plain old dmg, which the installer failed to mount/validate.

A promising (if hack-y) method is to begin the install as usual with DP6's Install macOS Big Sur Beta.app and my "Hax" or an alternative. Click through the process and pick a blank volume. Then, when it prompts to restart, swap out macOS Install Data/UpdateBundle on the target volume with the contents of the <long>.zip obtained from gdmf.apple.com. Then allow it to restart.

This skips the inconvenience of making a valid disk image, while still initiating a DP7 install.

The bad news is that -- on my 2010 MacBook anyways -- neither the installer, ramdisk, nor installed system boots. Not because of the method, but because Apple's changed something (in either the kernel or a low-level kext) which makes the system hang just after some AppleCredentialManager messages, in the very first page of verbose mode. Swapping out the boot KernelCollection with a DP6 copy allows for some progress, but we need to understand the root cause before moving forward.

Maybe some of the experts here (looking at you, @jackluke ) have some ideas! I'm going to try some kext swaps, but I'm not too good at debugging issues at such an early stage in the boot process.

Much of the credit for these discoveries goes to @ploppityplop25 and @DhinakG on Discord. Thanks to those awesome folks for their work on this problem!

 

[ASentientBot]

So, the good news is that I convinced DP7 to boot on a Core 2 Duo.

The bad news is that I did it by swapping in the DP6 kernel, and it wouldn't even reach single-user mode without that.

• Every DP7 kext + the DP6 kernel = boots
• Every DP6 kext + the DP7 kernel = hangs

I did multiple swaps and KC rebuilds to confirm this. So it's clear that the kernel is the culprit.

Whatever Apple's changed in the kernel completely breaks it on (presumably) Penryn systems. This is... not good.

 

[DerMario]

Is there any InstallAssistant file for beta 7? I can't find one...

 

[sinbad21]

That means BootKernelExtensions.kc isn't pointing to the Preboot or to the right boot.efi , booting BigSur outside of opencore, from terminal try this to fix it:

sudo bless --folder /System/Volumes/Preboot/*/System/Library/CoreServices --bootefi /System/Volumes/Preboot/*/System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi --label BigSur

but boot.efi should be the stock apple BigSur one, if it's a patched one I guess my customized USBopencore setup won't boot.

Yes, I suppose that my boot.efi is not the apple BigSur one, because it doesn't work. I think also that as my MBP is not retina, using iMac15,1 should give me a black screen.

 

[m3rih]

Hi everybody, can i install big sur on macbookpro 9,2 without any issue? If yes, how? I tried to read all but I cannot find because it is so complicated to find the right post from 173 pages.

 

[Ju Lien]

It’s possible install Big Sur on my MacBook Pro 5,5 ...? Mid 2009?
À lot of post here.....
help me for good patcher....
I’m on Catalina 10.15.6 with patcher dosdude...
Thx

ps: I try install Big Sur with patcher but I have circle when I boot on usb...
I try beta 6, beta 5, and beta 4....! Same result for all

 

[hvds]

It’s possible install Big Sur on my MacBook Pro 5,5 ...? Mid 2009?
À lot of post here.....
help me for good patcher....
I’m on Catalina 10.15.6 with patcher dosdude...
Thx

I have public beta 1 on my MBP5,2 (mid 2009, legacy USB, non-Metal GPU).
It is usable for testing, not production, as there is framebuffer support but no full graphics acceleration.
Installed this using jackluke‘s prelinked kernel method. No luck with any BS version beyond PB1=DP4.
PB1 runs stable. Photos doesn‘t work.

Please see details of post #3900. Without the USB3 trick, the target disk needs to be on SATA for installation.

 

[Barry K. Nathan]

I very much doubt this conclusion. A RAM issue of that magnitude would result in non-booting system for sure. What is the chance that a single bit would get flipped there, but nothing else would break? Much more likely is that @eminemmm is using a patched boot.efi or has some other modified/corrupted system file.

Or, something is happening which we don't understand, like an undocumented boot-arg or change in the SIP flags. Apple and macOS are complex beasts. We think we're smart, but we only scratch the surface... tons of things we take for granted could have been altered.

Assuming a RAM failure from that one oddity is a huge jump.

The patched boot.efi possibility occurred to me after my last post, and in retrospect I should've asked about it.

However, I had RAM problems of a similar magnitude on my own MacBookPro8,1 and MacBook7,1 last year, so I know that it would not "result in a non-booting system for sure". I only got weird stuff like this happening once every 2 months or less, and I never seemed to have any filesystem corruption (at least not to the point that Disk Utility/fsck could detect on APFS). Nonetheless, Apple Hardware Test and memtest86+ would both consistently fail the RAM; swapping in different RAM modules fixed it, and Crucial replaced the defective RAM under warranty. I have seen similar RAM problems on many Macs and PCs over the years (including at a past job where I was an admin of 200+ systems, so not just personal systems). I've seen the effects of bad RAM bit flips too many times on too many almost-but-not-quite-100%-working computers over too long a period of time to not believe it is the most likely possibility (at least aside from a patched boot.efi).

Having said that, now that I've slept and am thinking more clearly, "most likely possibility" (which I could still be mistaken about, for that matter) doesn't come anywhere near proving it, and I absolutely overreacted. I did make a leap that went too far. (And there is also a flaw in patch-kexts.sh which I should try to fix at some point.)

@eminemmm So did you install a patched boot.efi? Either way, for now I'll proceed assuming the RAM is good -- ASentientBot is right that it's likely and I shouldn't dismiss it out of hand. At some point it would still be good to run memtest86+ and see whether it finds anything wrong. (In my case I usually run it by booting up an old Ubuntu Linux DVD, but later today I'll figure out again how to do it without an old Linux DVD lying around and I'll provide brief instructions.)

 

[Barry K. Nathan]

Hi everybody, can i install big sur on macbookpro 9,2 without any issue? If yes, how? I tried to read all but I cannot find because it is so complicated to find the right post from 173 pages.

It's going to be easier once I finish v0.2.0 of the Big Sur micropatcher (hopefully later today, there are still a few small bugs I need to squash, plus I need to massively update the README because so much has changed since the last patcher release). Until then, if you're not already running Big Sur, I would suggest waiting.

 

[RITAMA]

Hi everybody, can i install big sur on macbookpro 9,2 without any issue? If yes, how? I tried to read all but I cannot find because it is so complicated to find the right post from 173 pages.

Yes..Big Sur Beta 6 all work Ok
Make Installer with patch (Micropatcher 0.0.19 from Mr Barry K. Nathan)

 

[m3rih]

Yes..Big Sur Beta 6 all work Ok
Make Installer with patch (Micropatcher 0.0.19 from Mr Barry K. Nathan)

Thanks for the answer. Where can i find micropatcher and bigsur installer?

 

[RITAMA]

Thanks for the answer. Where can i find micropatcher and bigsur installer?

Release v0.0.19 · barrykn/big-sur-micropatcher

Just a couple of quick fixes: The Ethernet fix for 2011 Macs now works on beta 4 as well as beta 3 (and will hopefully keep working in the future). set-vars.sh no longer sets amfi_get_out_of_my_wa...

github.com

http://swcdn.apple.com/.../smuubcmj0.../InstallAssistant.pkg

 

[Barry K. Nathan]

Thanks for the answer. Where can i find micropatcher and bigsur installer?

I'll post a link (hopefully later today) once I release v0.2.0. (I see that @RITAMA just posted the link as I was writing this.)

As the creator of the micropatcher, I'm telling you it really would be much easier to wait until the next release (as I said, hopefully later today -- the big remaining task is updating the documentation so people can actually use it). If you try to use v0.0.19 as @RITAMA suggested, boot is going to fail with a prohibited sign partway during installation, and if you don't keep another OS installed on your Mac, you won't be able to boot.

Please don't install it yet.