macOS 12 Monterey on Unsupported Macs Thread

[Joka80]

Your problem stems from this; "My disk is formatted to macOS extended journaled".
Monterey requires the use of APFS. The easiest way to switch over to that file system is to download Carbon Copy Cloner, you can use it free for a month on the trial system, and make a backup of your disk to an external USB drive. You do not need a bootable backup. Use the OCLP app to make a Monterey USB install disk, and be sure to have the OCLP write to the USB's EFI disk. Boot up from that USB drive using the boot picker (option key at boot), and erase the internal disk using APFS. Then run the OS install from the USB. You can use that CCC backup disk at the end of the installation to migrate your data. Read the OCLP instructions! https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/
You must run the post install Root Patches on that old hardware. After you have made sure that the system works, install OCLP to the Monterey disk so you do not need to boot from the USB drive. Getting used to using the OCLP app is essential. Good luck!

Ok, I wasn’t aware that Monterey needs an APFS formatted drive.
Like I said I’ve installed on newer unsupported Mac’s that have probably natively supported APFS. I have a few things to backup from that drive but don’t really need to clone it. So I’ll back up a few personal files and then wipe the drive and reformat using the OCLP bootable Monterey USB. I’ll report back if it works or not.

 

[ballooh]

Fixed It… Definitely not the recommended way but, worked for me.

First I installed Paragon Disk Manager on my laptop running High Sierra.
Skinned my iMac and removed the hard drive (left it open till the end).
Connected the hard drive to my laptop using a powered KingPro USB - SSD adapter.
Started Paragon Disk Manager and deleted every partition on my iMac hard drive then, copied both the EFI and Recovery partitions to the free space of my iMac hard drive and finally formatted the remaining free space to HFS+ and ejected the disk.

After that, i connected the disk back to my iMac which I left open incase I needed to re-run the disk process again and also disconnected the speakers to avoid noise during startups.

As the next step, I installed High Sierra and updated it until it said no updates available (not sure if it was necessary but, I did it so I didn’t have to repeat the process again.

While installing High Sierra on the iMac, I created my Monterey 12.6 install disk on my laptop using OCLP 0.4.7 on a USB3.0 disk ( here I chose iMac 9,1) from the machines list.

After that, I followed the usual install instructions and it worked!

Thereafter, I updated to 12.6.2 and it’s running pretty good.

Again, I am still not sure why it was not working but guess it may have had something to do with the hard disk structure as mine was missing the Recovery partition but may as well be the Monterey and OCLP versions.

One thing I must admit though is that, after installing High Sierra i deactivated Updates in Terminal as I was suspecting there might be a connection to the update error which kept popping up but I am not sure if this helped in anyway but what I can say is that, this time round it didn’t try to update during the installation.

I also navigated the Monterey install disk prior to see if there were any files related to updates and found two but I was not sure if they were in anyway direct related to the update issue or not. However, upon trying to edit the update values from “TRUE” to “FALSE” it didn’t work because I was lazy to reboot and make privilege changes on my system so, I took a risk for the last time and it worked.

 

[Joka80]

Ok, I wasn’t aware that Monterey needs an APFS formatted drive.
Like I said I’ve installed on newer unsupported Mac’s that have probably natively supported APFS. I have a few things to backup from that drive but don’t really need to clone it. So I’ll back up a few personal files and then wipe the drive and reformat using the OCLP bootable Monterey USB. I’ll report back if it works or not.

So all running macOS Monterey on a 2008 iMac 8.1.

I created a USB installer as suggested and also ensured that the EFI boot partition of the USB stick also had OCLP installed (0.5.3)

I also ensured that OCLP was installed on the iMacs internal hard drive (it was installed already before 0.5.3)

So whilst powering on I held ALT and selected the EFI loader from the picker for the USB stick and then on the next screen the Monterey installer. Went through the installation fine no problem, restarted a few times each time I had to ensure it was going to boot into the Mac’s internal hard drive EFI Monterey installer to “continue” the install and not loop the USB installer. Several restarts later macOS Monterey on the screen with all patches already done and running sweet. I didn’t wipe my internal hard drive in the end but I did make a backup just incase. I didn’t wipe it because the USB installer allowed the installation to continue at the disk installation selection screen. But I can see that during the installation process it has obviously been converted to APFS. I do hope this helps other people on here as well and thanks for the pointers in the right direction.

 

[cmykkid]

First of all, thanks to all the smart folks who are keeping my 10 year old Macs up to date. Bravo.

Forgive me if this issue has been answered somewhere, but I looked and couldn’t find it. Also, I’m not a newbie, but I’m not an expert either.

I installed Mac OS 12.6.1 on my stock Mac Book Pro (9,1) Mid 2012 in November of 2022 using OCLP 0.5.2. It worked like a charm. No issues at all. Then about 2 weeks ago I did an Over The Air update to Mac OS 12.6.2. Everything worked perfectly. After the update I launched OCLP and it said there was an update to 0.5.3 so I updated/down loaded it. I also ran the Post Install Root Patch where it updated my Kepler so and so. I don’t remember exactly.

Soon after I noticed that when I woke my Mac up after it was sleeping for hours my built in speakers didn’t work. It would default to Optical Digital-Out Port. There was no option to switch it to Built In Speakers. I have never used the Optical Digital-Out Port in 10 years, but it would glow red when in this state. After a few days of troubleshooting I figured out that if this happens, I need to put it to sleep again and then wake it up. That solves the issue.

Any ideas what the issue is? Thanks.

 

[plugsnpixels]

Firmware update:

I got my MacBook Air 6,1 firmware up to date awhile ago by installing Big Sur 11.7.1 on an external drive (I did not ever have it installed on the MBA). Otherwise I'm running the latest Monterey via OCLP.

Even though Big Sur 11.7.2 came out a couple of weeks ago, Silent Knight currently reports my firmware as up to date (474.0.0.0.0).

I'm wondering if anyone knows offhand whether it's worth updating Big Sur on the external drive as there may not actually be a firmware revision (which is the only point of having the external drive OS handy).

 

[mwidjaya]

Even though Big Sur 11.7.2 came out a couple of weeks ago, Silent Knight currently reports my firmware as up to date (474.0.0.0.0).

Not every update will include firmware update.

The latest Big Sur 11.7.2 does not, so no action required and SK confirms that too.

 

[makra]

Firmware update:

I got my MacBook Air 6,1 firmware up to date awhile ago by installing Big Sur 11.7.1 on an external drive (I did not ever have it installed on the MBA). Otherwise I'm running the latest Monterey via OCLP.

Even though Big Sur 11.7.2 came out a couple of weeks ago, Silent Knight currently reports my firmware as up to date (474.0.0.0.0).

I'm wondering if anyone knows offhand whether it's worth updating Big Sur on the external drive as there may not actually be a firmware revision (which is the only point of having the external drive OS handy).

Thanks for asking! I just realized, that 11.7.1 hasn't updated the firmware of my supported MBA6,1 (no OCLP) to 474.0.0.0.0. 🤫

 

[producer26]

Hello guys and thanks for all the effort you put on these. My 3,1 Mac Pro works well on Monterey (I have a Radeon HD 7950 Mac edition and SSDs in the trunk). But my audio card on board disappeared. It only shows the external MOTU 8Pre card. I wouldn't really mind on that as my primary purpose s to use MOTU as my default sound card. The only problem is that I used to use the optical port on my Mac Pro. By not seing the on board sound card , I cannot use the optical port. I think the problem comes from my installation process. As I cannot see a boot screen , I cannot use recovery mode or anything else to configure SIP or anything. So I used OCLP to install Monterey on an SSD using my iMac . I used Mac Pro 3,1 option in settings but maybe OCLP "saw" iMac and didn't load the appropriate kext or something. Any thoughts?
Thanks again in advance and happy new year to all

 

[joevt]

but maybe OCLP "saw" iMac and didn't load the appropriate kext or something. Any thoughts?

Maybe this. I think Monterey on MacPro3,1 requires AppleALC in the OCLP installation for proper audio. Does AppleALC appear in ioreg?

 

[producer26]

Thanks for replying. Yeas it seems ok at first glance but maybe the screen helps you understand more

 

[maddib]

Unbelievable! Now, I also think about installing Monterey on my upgraded cMP5,1. And here I have some questions regarding OCLP.

I already upgraded my cMP5,1 with
- mPCI BCM943602CDP with 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 4.2 from osxwifi
- Sonnet Allegro Pro USB 3.1 PCIe card
- Sonnet Fusion SSD m.2 NVME PCIe card (only, no HDD installed)
- Qnap Single-port (10Gbase-T) 10GbE PCIe card
- AMD Vega Frontier Edition (flashed with Apple EFI)

Everything works perfectly under Mojave, even with a boot screen.

So, when installing and configuring OCLP, or for post patches, are the upgrades above of any relevance? Do I have to consider them when performing the concrete steps with OCLP?

Thanks a lot!

 

[Dilli]

I had stopped at Catalina as my Mac book Air 4,2 was working excellent and I got a bit lazy going through the patching process. However, I was bored too and wanted to experiment with some new features. I was away and had not visited this forum for a bit
So I watched some Mr Mackintosh videos on YouTube which inspired me. Also Open core 0.53 has come a long way with some great patches for the unsupported macs.
That was it and there was no stopping. I finally upgraded to Monterey OS on my mid 2011 Mac Book Air.

Everything works great except Keyboard Lighting which worked only once but now it doesn't though the developers included the patch but no big deal I got 3rd party app "Lab Tick" to get it to work.
The other issue faced is in Safari. The login details don't stick while filling up forms but no issue in other browsers.

So here I am a happy person and thinking how 🍎 tried to demoralize and give no support but the great Developers of Open Core did it.👏👏

I tried my iMac mid 2011 27inch but faced issue even though I tried fresh install in a new internal ssd and using the installer open core but never reached the recovery screen. Rather got 3 beeps and had a failed memory stick just before trying the patch process. So moved back to my current environment of BigSur which works great so far, after replacing the bad memory stick.

I am grateful to all and both my macs is still working with the latest OS is a big boon.👍

 

[Dilli]

Fixed It… Definitely not the recommended way but, worked for me.

First I installed Paragon Disk Manager on my laptop running High Sierra.
Skinned my iMac and removed the hard drive (left it open till the end).
Connected the hard drive to my laptop using a powered KingPro USB - SSD adapter.
Started Paragon Disk Manager and deleted every partition on my iMac hard drive then, copied both the EFI and Recovery partitions to the free space of my iMac hard drive and finally formatted the remaining free space to HFS+ and ejected the disk.

After that, i connected the disk back to my iMac which I left open incase I needed to re-run the disk process again and also disconnected the speakers to avoid noise during startups.

As the next step, I installed High Sierra and updated it until it said no updates available (not sure if it was necessary but, I did it so I didn’t have to repeat the process again.

While installing High Sierra on the iMac, I created my Monterey 12.6 install disk on my laptop using OCLP 0.4.7 on a USB3.0 disk ( here I chose iMac 9,1) from the machines list.

After that, I followed the usual install instructions and it worked!

Thereafter, I updated to 12.6.2 and it’s running pretty good.

Again, I am still not sure why it was not working but guess it may have had something to do with the hard disk structure as mine was missing the Recovery partition but may as well be the Monterey and OCLP versions.

One thing I must admit though is that, after installing High Sierra i deactivated Updates in Terminal as I was suspecting there might be a connection to the update error which kept popping up but I am not sure if this helped in anyway but what I can say is that, this time round it didn’t try to update during the installation.

I also navigated the Monterey install disk prior to see if there were any files related to updates and found two but I was not sure if they were in anyway direct related to the update issue or not. However, upon trying to edit the update values from “TRUE” to “FALSE” it didn’t work because I was lazy to reboot and make privilege changes on my system so, I took a risk for the last time and it worked.

Maybe I will try this step for my iMac too.

 

[Dilli]

Unbelievable! Now, I also think about installing Monterey on my upgraded cMP5,1. And here I have some questions regarding OCLP.

I already upgraded my cMP5,1 with
- mPCI BCM943602CDP with 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 4.2 from osxwifi
- Sonnet Allegro Pro USB 3.1 PCIe card
- Sonnet Fusion SSD m.2 NVME PCIe card (only, no HDD installed)
- Qnap Single-port (10Gbase-T) 10GbE PCIe card
- AMD Vega Frontier Edition (flashed with Apple EFI)

Everything works perfectly under Mojave, even with a boot screen.

So, when installing and configuring OCLP, or for post patches, are the upgrades above of any relevance? Do I have to consider them when performing the concrete steps with OCLP?

Thanks a lot!

Post patches are a must for your Legacy patch to work with Monterey on your system

 

[hwojtek]

Post patches are a must for your Legacy patch to work with Monterey on your system

Which patches exactly? Here's a system with close to the same setup, I thought when "no patches needed" it is because they are, well, not needed?

 

[Dilli]

Which patches exactly? Here's a system with close to the same setup, I thought when "no patches needed" it is because they are, well, not needed?
View attachment 2139913

If the OCLP says no patches needed then its not needed. Everything is automated. Maybe I misunderstood your text earlier

 

[hwojtek]

I believe the needed patching for the wifi/BT and GPU happens with kexts loaded via config.plist in this case, so post-install patches are not necessary.

 

[MBAir2010]

After upgrading to the latest Monterey 12.6.2 release, my MacBook Pro 2012 i7 typed slow in Safari only.
what I did was install Oracle Java and that sped things up, as well as reset the pram.

hope this advice helped!

 

[webg3]

After upgrading to the latest Monterey 12.6.2 release, my MacBook Pro 2012 i7 typed slow in Safari only.
what I did was install Oracle Java and that sped things up, as well as reset the pram.

hope this advice helped!

Safari 16.2 (Monterey) is slow and not very functional watching Youtube with Intel HD Graphics 4000 (Air 2012 4GB RAM), if possible, do not update Safari to this version. Safari 16.2 (Big Sur and Ventura) we don't have this problem.

Fix = apply patch-root again

 

[Dilli]

Safari 16.2 (Monterey) is slow and not very functional with Intel HD Graphics 4000 (2012 models), if possible, do not update Safari to this version. Safari 16.2 (Big Sur) we don't have this problem

It seems I have he version 16.2 of Safari and like you said with Intel HD Graphics 3000 that I have on my macbook Air 2011 , I have issues specially in login forms as it crashes. I wonder If I can downgrade Safari.

 

[h9826790]

It seems I have he version 16.2 of Safari and like you said with Intel HD Graphics 3000 that I have on my macbook Air 2011 , I have issues specially in login forms as it crashes. I wonder If I can downgrade Safari.

Or may be it's time to avoid using Safari.

It's a good browser if it's working. However, if it can break down at any time, or stop functional properly in short future, may be it's time to switch to another browser, but not just downgrade it (even you can).

Broswer is a bit special, when we use it, 99.99% of the time because we are browsing something on the internet. Therefore, keep it up to date in order to have the latest security feature is relatively improtant. If you are forced to use older Safari, may be you should seriously consider to switch to something else.

e.g. Brave browser has pretty good security features and performance, it also has cross platform support. You may try it and see if it works better with your existing haerdware.

 

[TimmuJapan]

Safari 16.2 (Monterey) is slow and not very functional with Intel HD Graphics 4000 (2012 models), if possible, do not update Safari to this version. Safari 16.2 (Big Sur) we don't have this problem

The above post is misinformation.

I have a MacBook Pro 9,1 & 9,2.

Both have HD 4000 graphics and are using Monterey 12.6.2 and safari 16.2 with OCLP.

Both are unbelievably fast and responsive.

What is described above by @webg3 is NOT a general OCLP problem, but a problem specifically for this user’s device.

It is possible that you have hardware problems or a different problem with your set up, that you are unaware of. Your problem with a slow safari is not related to normal use of OCLP and a 2012 machine/HD4000. If it were, it would be the same on my machines—it is not. Again, I have two HD4000 machines running Monterey with OCLP and both run safari 16.2 beautifully. Both 2012 models are just about as fast in safari 16.2 as my 2020 MacBook Air which is natively supported.

 

[TigerA]

The above post is misinformation.

I have a MacBook Pro 9,1 & 9,2.

Both have HD 4000 graphics and are using Monterey 12.6.2 and safari 16.2 with OCLP.

Both are unbelievably fast and responsive.

What is described above by @webg3 & @MBAir2010 is NOT a general OCLP problem, but a problem specifically for these users’ devices.

It is possible that you both have hardware problems or a different problems with your set up, that you are unaware of. Your problem with a slow safari is not related to normal use of OCLP and a 2012 machine/HD4000. If it were, it would be the same on my machines—it is not. Again, I have two HD4000 machines running Monterey with OCLP and both run safari 16.2 beautifully. Both 2012 models are just about as fast in safari 16.2 as my 2020 MacBook Air which is natively supported.

I'd concur your view on this. I have a 2010, 2x 2011, and a 2012 iMac, all running 12.6.2 with the latest OCLP (053/054N). Safari 16.2 runs very smooth and fast.

 

[TimmuJapan]

@webg3

Looking at your post and your hardware signature, I would imagine that your problem with a slow safari in Monterey could be because of one of the following:
-you forgot to root patch after installation.
-you only have 4 GB of RAM in your machine (?🤔?)
-you need to do an nvram/pram and smc reset.
-you have some other hardware problem that you’re unaware of.
-something went sideways in your installation of Monterey, and you just need to do it one more time.

or it could be something else….. Your problem is definitely not related to OCLP and HD4000/Monterey/safari16.2, however, because many people (including myself) are using that hardware in OCLP with ease.

I think that most people who are using HD4000 macbooks (mbp 9,1 & 9,2) or HD4000 iMacs/Mac minis with OCLP and Monterey have maxed out their ram to 16GB, in addition to having upgraded the HDD to an SSD. I know that you can’t upgrade the ram in your particular MacBook Air (unless you want to contact someone like @dosdude1 about a de-soldering / re-soldering job! 😂)

I don’t know what the performance of a 2012 MacBook Air with only 4 GB of RAM would be like with Monterey / OCLP. Has there been a discussion of this specific point previously in this thread?

 

[MBAir2010]

Safari 16.2 (Monterey) is slow and not very functional with Intel HD Graphics 4000 (2012 models), if possible, do not update Safari to this version. Safari 16.2 (Big Sur) we don't have this problem

what I had to do to remedy safari and other things being slow on the MBP'12 was to re-install the OCLP root package.
everything is flying at top speed now, even safari 2023!