macOS High Sierra (10.13) Unsupported Macs Thread

[honeycombz]

That's interesting because it is the first report I have seen of a non-Apple GPU booting on a MP 3,1.
Is it a flashed PC card with efi.rom patch, or a purchase from MacVidcards in LA?
Does it display the efi.boot screen during booting? Without that efi screen, you may have problems setting up APFS booting. If you stay on HFS+, you may be OK.

It's a flashed PC card that displays the boot screen.

 

[roziek]

If you have installed APFS on a HDD, I would read the release notes before installing the upcoming updates as Apple apparently intends to automate a roll-back of the APFS on fusion and hard drives back to HFS+ prior to or at the GM release.

Apple itself...

http://appleinsider.com/articles/17...e-with-legacy-hdds-and-possibly-fusion-drives

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208018

While the GM will install all SSDs as APFS, they have decided to keep APFS off of hard drives and fusion drives for the initial release and won't support conversion from HFS to APFS. The promised support to roll back APFS to HFS is a good thing IMHO as there really should be a two way conversion available in Disk Utility to APFS and back again to HFS as well.

I have no HDDs—only SSDs. I would not touch APFS on HDD with a barge pole after Apple's warnings.

[doublepost=1504250216][/doublepost]Apple HAS said it will support APFS on HDD just NOT at the 10.13 GM release. It is risky to use APFS on HDD so be careful.

Guys, I really hate to do this, but I simply can't stand sites like this and their... "reporting" . Where does it actually say that, anywhere in those two links? Let's see.

AppleInsider starts terribly:

The new APFS brings notable enhancements to High Sierra and iOS, but on the Mac it appears that legacy hard drives are completely incompatible with the technology and at least at launch that Fusion drives may not be either.

Where does that information come from? If they had any real source, they would have linked to it. They didn't, so that's either (a) information they pulled out of thin air (terrible), or (b) their free interpretation of Apple's support document (equally terrible).

They even state later:

AppleInsider has reached out to Apple for clarification of the discrepancies between the support document and the release notes for the High Sierra beta, and will update with any information that is shared with us.

They didn't update it so far, so no information from Apple, but that didn't stop them from publishing this joke of a reporting.

This Apple's support document has been here for a while now and the only thing it clearly states is that HFS installations of Sierra residing on HDDs will not be automatically converted to APFS during the upgrade to High Sierra, while HFS installations of Sierra residing on SSDs will and it will not be possible to opt out of that.

Doesn't say anywhere that you can't convert it yourself if you want to, that it won't be possible (and as we've seen, it's perfectly possible, we've done it here on the forums ourselves). Just that it won't be converted to APFS automatically during the upgrade process.

Apple is always very careful with their wording matching their intent.

Now, to be very clear: what I'm saying is that this might very well be true, but just not based on those two sources. So if you have other sources that actually confirm that - please link to them here, I'll be grateful (and I'm sure others too).

P.S. @jhowarth @nekton1 Now, on a totally different note . Those SATA II speeds are starting to annoy me more and more, and I'd like my SSDs to take advantage of their speed potential. Any advice on that front? What's your current solution?

I'm not willing to buy PCI-E SSDs since I have 2,5" SSDs that are perfectly fine, so probably the only option for me is some kind of PCI-E card that I can connect them to. This card has to be bootable of course, and preferably natively (plug & play); just don't want the hassle of messing around with kexts, etc.

If it wouldn't cost a fortune, that would be nice too .

Anyone with Mac Pros out there - please feel free to pitch in!

 

[nekton1]

Guys, I really hate to do this, but I simply can't stand sites like this and their... "reporting" . Where does it actually say that, anywhere in those two links? Let's see.

AppleInsider starts terribly:



Where does that information come from? If they had any real source, they would have linked to it. They didn't, so that's either (a) information they pulled out of thin air (terrible), or (b) their free interpretation of Apple's support document (equally terrible).

They even state later:



They didn't update it so far, so no information from Apple, but that didn't stop them from publishing this joke of a reporting.

This Apple's support document has been here for a while now and the only thing it clearly states is that HFS installations of Sierra residing on HDDs will not be automatically converted to APFS during the upgrade to High Sierra, while HFS installations of Sierra residing on SSDs will and it will not be possible to opt out of that.

Doesn't say anywhere that you can't convert it yourself if you want to, that it won't be possible (and as we've seen, it's perfectly possible, we've done it here on the forums ourselves). Just that it won't be converted to APFS automatically during the upgrade process.

Apple is always very careful with their wording matching their intent.

Now, to be very clear: what I'm saying is that this might very well be true, but just not based on those two sources. So if you have other sources that actually confirm that - please link to them here, I'll be grateful (and I'm sure others too).

P.S. @jhowarth @nekton1 Now, on a totally different note . Those SATA II speeds are starting to annoy me more and more, and I'd like my SSDs to take advantage of their speed potential. Any advice on that front? What's your current solution?

I'm not willing to buy PCI-E SSDs since I have 2,5" SSDs that are perfectly fine, so probably the only option for me is some kind of PCI-E card that I can connect them to. This card has to be bootable of course, and preferably natively (plug & play); just don't want the hassle of messing around with kexts, etc.

If it wouldn't cost a fortune, that would be nice too .

Anyone with Mac Pros out there - please feel free to pitch in!

Get a Sonnet Tempo card; gives 6 Gbps, boots and has no problems with APFS that I have seen after the multi-SSD booting problem was solved.
[doublepost=1504263451][/doublepost]roziek,
In this case you'll just have to believe (aka have faith) that these words are paraphrased right from the Apple source. There are no links. This has been stated where it matters—APFS will NOT be supported on HDDs at GM release; it will come later.

 

[roziek]

Get a Sonnet Tempo card; gives 6 Gbps, boots and has no problems with APFS that I have seen after the multi-SSD booting problem was solved.

Ouch, quite expensive where I live (more like ~$350). I would have considered it still if it wasn’t for the fact that you can put only one SSD in there. It’s too expensive to buy for every SSD I have, plus I have two PCI slots takes already by GTX970 and ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT, and I want them to have breathing room.

I’ve heard of PCI cards with just SATA slots in them (2-4), so you can attach disks to it via plain old SATA cables. That would be ideal for me.
[doublepost=1504265874][/doublepost]P.S. that Sonnet Tempo boots natively, no drivers required, no messing around on my part, just plug&play ?

 

[jhowarth]

It looks like it's just the UUIDs for the ESPs that are the same, which shouldn't make a difference as the script doesn't look at that. I don't believe the system updates make any changes to the ESP (and if they do, they shouldn't overwrite any of the files added). If you do clone the drive, all you'd need to do is re-run the post-install patch on the cloned volume.

So I assume these identical UUIDs are a side effect of the APFS patch not making sure that the apfs.efi loaded is coming from the same drive as the desired root partition? It would be interesting to see if this common UUID artifact disaoppeared if we placed a UUID plac ekeeper file on the EFI partition to make sure that the generated startup.nsh insured the loaded apfs.efi resided on the same physical drive.

 

[RogueB]

Get a Sonnet Tempo card; gives 6 Gbps, boots and has no problems with APFS that I have seen after the multi-SSD booting problem was solved.
[doublepost=1504263451][/doublepost]roziek,
In this case you'll just have to believe (aka have faith) that these words are paraphrased right from the Apple source. There are no links. This has been stated where it matters—APFS will NOT be supported on HDDs at GM release; it will come later.

I have MacBook Pro 5,2 (2009 17inch), in which I have replaced the original drive with Seagate Hybrid HDD.
Hybrid HDDs are similar in functionality to fusion HDDs.

I am running developer Beta 8, with file system converted to APFS, and have absolutely zero problems in terms of file maintenance or functionality. Transfer rates between machines, or folders, are much higher, and there are other benefits (see posts from "roziek")

While my machine is not a MacPro, and my HDD connection is SATA, the HDD itself appears to be fully capable of handling APFS.

This is just my experience on a specific machine, but just wanted to add a data point to APFS compatibility records.

 

[jhowarth]

I have MacBook Pro 5,2 (2009 17inch), in which I have replaced the original drive with Seagate Hybrid HDD.
Hybrid HDDs are similar in functionality to fusion HDDs.

I am running developer Beta 8, with file system converted to APFS, and have absolutely zero problems in terms of file maintenance or functionality. Transfer rates between machines, or folders, are much higher, and there are other benefits (see posts from "roziek")

While my machine is not a MacPro, and my HDD connection is SATA, the HDD itself appears to be fully capable of handling APFS.

This is just my experience on a specific machine, but just wanted to add a data point to APFS compatibility records.

I'm not sure if this is related to Apple's decision to pull the plug on APFS support for HDDs and fusion drives, but on a drive with a fairly large number of files from development projects like gcc and llvm svn, I never could successfully get the 'diskutil apfs convert' command to complete without an error condition. Also, after the most recent 2.2.1 APFS patch update, I had begun to see some stuck boots of the APFS volume on an older SATA2 hard drive. I doubt those are related to the EFI boot changes but more likely just the remaining APFS HDD bugs popping up.

 

[shaocaholica]

Hybrid HDDs are similar in functionality to fusion HDDs.

Eh, not really comparable with respect to the current discussion. Hybrid drives are managed at the low level by the drive controller. It's transparent to the OS and filesystem. Fusion drives and their equivelants are managed by the OS and sometimes influenced by the filesystem. From a filesystem/OS compatibility and support perspective those are 2 very different things.

Still, good to have the data point.

 

[hvds]

Hi everyone,

first let me thank you all sincerely for all the work you put in getting my old mac pro to run High Sierra. It really means a great deal to me that my old PC isn't depreciated for another few years now.

However, today I had a small problem. I got a notification from Patch Updater that a new patch was available to enable night shift on unsupported machines. After installing this patch few to none of my system preferences work. They simply crash as soon as I open them :-(

Is there anything I can do to revert this? Everything worked perfectly before that patch.

You can find the crash log here: https://pastebin.com/izXFzApc

Thanks,

Tony

edit, all is a bit of an exaggeration. I've not checked one by one and the following crash: Dispaly, keyboard, mouse, trackpad, accessibility

Just to add another data point to the record of success of High Sierra on unsupported macs, great thanks to all contributors and testers! And also to state that here is another case of the mentioned NightShift problem.

I have a MacBookPro5.2, 17inches, mid2009, and use an external (USB) Samsung 840Pro SSD, 256GB, for the High Sierra installation. I am using the macOS High Sierra Patcher 2.2.1. The rest of my system I take from the internal SATA (sorry wrote SASE first) disk which is another Samsung SSD, with Sierra. This internal disk has trim enabled under HS without further action.

I worked happily with HS on HFS+ for a few days. Then I installed the NightShift patch using the Patch Updater, still on HFS+. I observe the same crashes in system settings as Funkstar2 did (in display, keyboard, mouse, trackpad - forgot to test accessibility). Doesn't bother me much, I don't really need NightShift, but I wanted to report.

I then converted this HFS+ system to APFS with terminal (diskutil apfs convert diskXsY) and then applied the Post Install patch for APFS. Worked perfectly! and of course inherited the system settings crashes.

Then did a fresh install on APFS right away, and that also works perfectly! So I'm quite sure the final HighSierra will run well on the MacBookPro5.2. Many thanks again!

(For completeness, I applied the NightShift patch again with Patch Updater... and yes, the system settings crash again. This seems to happen only in Funkstar2's and my case as far as I saw in this thread. Not a big deal for me anyway, but wanted to report.)

 

[nekton1]

Ouch, quite expensive where I live (more like ~$350). I would have considered it still if it wasn’t for the fact that you can put only one SSD in there. It’s too expensive to buy for every SSD I have, plus I have two PCI slots takes already by GTX970 and ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT, and I want them to have breathing room.

I’ve heard of PCI cards with just SATA slots in them (2-4), so you can attach disks to it via plain old SATA cables. That would be ideal for me.
[doublepost=1504265874][/doublepost]P.S. that Sonnet Tempo boots natively, no drivers required, no messing around on my part, just plug&play ?

You can mount 2 SSDs on one card and here in Asia they cost about $120. I will send you model details when I get to office. Boots natively.

 

[RogueB]

I'm not sure if this is related to Apple's decision to pull the plug on APFS support for HDDs and fusion drives, but on a drive with a fairly large number of files from development projects like gcc and llvm svn, I never could successfully get the 'diskutil apfs convert' command to complete without an error condition. Also, after the most recent 2.2.1 APFS patch update, I had begun to see some stuck boots of the APFS volume on an older SATA2 hard drive. I doubt those are related to the EFI boot changes but more likely just the remaining APFS HDD bugs popping up.

I understand. Files on my laptop are not quite in those numbers, or density.
Apple just released HS beta 9 and there are a significant changes/improvements to APFS, including encryption, and functionality of Disk Utility in regard to APFS, etc.
Those changes, thought, might not be sufficient to resolve APFS issues on your machine.
[doublepost=1504291440][/doublepost]

Eh, not really comparable with respect to the current discussion. Hybrid drives are managed at the low level by the drive controller. It's transparent to the OS and filesystem. Fusion drives and their equivelants are managed by the OS and sometimes influenced by the filesystem. From a filesystem/OS compatibility and support perspective those are 2 very different things.

Still, good to have the data point.

I should have been more careful, when using phrase "similar functionality."

I was referring to the end effect, which is to store "most" accessed files, or "bits" of files, in a flash type memory for quick retrieval and, hence, faster performance. The mechanics are different, much as you described. Thanks.

The fusion-drive on the iMac 2012 also operates on APFS without complaint, and transfer of data between the two machines appears much faster, then before APFS "assimilation."

 

[roziek]

You can mount 2 SSDs on one card and here in Asia they cost about $120. I will send you model details when I get to office. Boots natively.

Are we still talking about Tempo SSD? Maybe you mean the Tempo SSD Pro Plus? Pro Plus can hold two SSDs, but this one is $299 (so here it's more like ~$1000).

Please send me the model you're referring to .

 

[tarasis]

Anyone seeing developer beta 9?

Also @dosdude1 the system.log is litter'd with logs like these below:

Sep 1 21:33:15 MacBook-Pro apfshelperd[93936]: Booter volume not found
Sep 1 21:33:15 MacBook-Pro com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.dosdude1.apfshelperd[93936]): Service exited with abnormal code: 255
Sep 1 21:33:15 MacBook-Pro com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.dosdude1.apfshelperd): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Sep 1 21:33:15 MacBook-Pro com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.imfoundation.IMRemoteURLConnectionAgent): Unknown key for integer: _DirtyJetsamMemoryLimit
Sep 1 21:33:25 MacBook-Pro syslogd[58]: ASL Sender Statistics
Sep 1 21:33:25 MacBook-Pro apfshelperd[93940]: Booter volume not found
Sep 1 21:33:25 MacBook-Pro com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.dosdude1.apfshelperd[93940]): Service exited with abnormal code: 255
Sep 1 21:33:25 MacBook-Pro com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.dosdude1.apfshelperd): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Sep 1 21:33:35 MacBook-Pro apfshelperd[93943]: Booter volume not found​

 

[dosdude1]

Anyone seeing developer beta 9?

Also @dosdude1 the system.log is litter'd with logs like these below:

Sep 1 21:33:15 MacBook-Pro apfshelperd[93936]: Booter volume not found
Sep 1 21:33:15 MacBook-Pro com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.dosdude1.apfshelperd[93936]): Service exited with abnormal code: 255
Sep 1 21:33:15 MacBook-Pro com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.dosdude1.apfshelperd): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Sep 1 21:33:15 MacBook-Pro com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.imfoundation.IMRemoteURLConnectionAgent): Unknown key for integer: _DirtyJetsamMemoryLimit
Sep 1 21:33:25 MacBook-Pro syslogd[58]: ASL Sender Statistics
Sep 1 21:33:25 MacBook-Pro apfshelperd[93940]: Booter volume not found
Sep 1 21:33:25 MacBook-Pro com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.dosdude1.apfshelperd[93940]): Service exited with abnormal code: 255
Sep 1 21:33:25 MacBook-Pro com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.dosdude1.apfshelperd): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Sep 1 21:33:35 MacBook-Pro apfshelperd[93943]: Booter volume not found​

That's leftover from the previous implementation of the APFS booting method. Just run "sudo rm /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.dosdude1.apfshelperd.plist", reboot, and that'll get rid of it.

 

[Computers 4 U LLC]

Anyone seeing developer beta 9?

Also @dosdude1 the system.log is litter'd with logs like these below:

Sep 1 21:33:15 MacBook-Pro apfshelperd[93936]: Booter volume not found
Sep 1 21:33:15 MacBook-Pro com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.dosdude1.apfshelperd[93936]): Service exited with abnormal code: 255
Sep 1 21:33:15 MacBook-Pro com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.dosdude1.apfshelperd): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Sep 1 21:33:15 MacBook-Pro com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.imfoundation.IMRemoteURLConnectionAgent): Unknown key for integer: _DirtyJetsamMemoryLimit
Sep 1 21:33:25 MacBook-Pro syslogd[58]: ASL Sender Statistics
Sep 1 21:33:25 MacBook-Pro apfshelperd[93940]: Booter volume not found
Sep 1 21:33:25 MacBook-Pro com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.dosdude1.apfshelperd[93940]): Service exited with abnormal code: 255
Sep 1 21:33:25 MacBook-Pro com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.dosdude1.apfshelperd): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.
Sep 1 21:33:35 MacBook-Pro apfshelperd[93943]: Booter volume not found​

Brand new to the forum, just joined. I have been keeping up with the thread though and have successfully used dosdude1's patch to install Sierra on an early 2009 iMac (9,1) and then successfully upgrade this same machine to High Sierra. I just got developer beta 9 within the last hour or so.

Many thanks to all those involved to get these newer software packages working on older unsupported but still very relevant machines.

 

[tarasis]

That's leftover from the previous implementation of the APFS booting method. Just run "sudo rm /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.dosdude1.apfshelperd.plist", reboot, and that'll get rid of it.

Cheers, that did the trick.
[doublepost=1504298905][/doublepost]Heh rather than see Dev Beta 9 turn up as an update I got, Public Beta 8 instead.

Slightly confused why it switched. Could someone post the Update catalog URL so I can swap back onto the proper track? Thank you.

 

[roziek]

Anyone willing to share Developer Beta 9? Public Beta not here yet.
[doublepost=1504299260][/doublepost]

Could someone post the Update catalog URL so I can swap back onto the proper track? Thank you.

Or that .

 

[roziek]

Here you go, just checked, Developer Beta 9 shows up:

https://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.13seed-10.13-10.12-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog.gz

Make sure your /Users/Shared/.SeedEnrollment.plist is set to DeveloperSeed.

 

[nekton1]

You can mount 2 SSDs on one card and here in Asia they cost about $120. I will send you model details when I get to office. Boots natively.

Are we still talking about Tempo SSD? Maybe you mean the Tempo SSD Pro Plus? Pro Plus can hold two SSDs, but this one is $299 (so here it's more like ~$1000).

Please send me the model you're referring to .

Some pictures

[doublepost=1504303792][/doublepost]

Some pictures

[doublepost=1504303992][/doublepost]We have a problem with Software Update using this RefiND boot loader method. Although the Software Update mechanism sees the beta 9 update and downloads it, the restart fails to run the installer. There is a brief 2 minute period when the first part of the install completes and then the Mac reboots to complete the full install but the RefiND booter kicks in and the Mac just boots to the previous OS.
Any ideas?

 

[roziek]

Some picturesView attachment 715517
[doublepost=1504303792][/doublepost]
View attachment 715520

Thanks! Is it some kind of earlier version or something? Maybe they later realized they can make more money if they sell them separately, as options for just one and for two SSDs? When did you buy it? Is this model still available where you live and for the price you mentioned?

 

[nekton1]

Here you go, just checked, Developer Beta 9 shows up:

https://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.13seed-10.13-10.12-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog.gz

Make sure your /Users/Shared/.SeedEnrollment.plist is set to DeveloperSeed.

Don't bother, it downloads but the software install is blocked by the RefiND booter for some reason!
It needs a fix or download of a full installer and creation of a USB boot stick again to get the next update.
[doublepost=1504304189][/doublepost]

Thanks! Is it some kind of earlier version or something? Maybe they later realized they can make more money if they sell them separately, as options for just one and for two SSDs? When did you buy it? Is this model still available where you live and for the price you mentioned?

Bought about 2 years ago. Let me look and see if I can find one here at what price.

 

[roziek]

@nekton1 Sorry, I was apparently blind when I looked at their page . The $99 model does indeed take two SSDs. Thank you, I’ll try to find some local resellers.

 

[nekton1]

Thanks! Is it some kind of earlier version or something? Maybe they later realized they can make more money if they sell them separately, as options for just one and for two SSDs? When did you buy it? Is this model still available where you live and for the price you mentioned?

It is available here:
http://www.akibakan.com/BCAK0063618/
The picture shows one SSD mounted but the kit includes a second extension plate that bolts on to carry a second SSD that connects to a SATA connector at the card edge.
The Akibakan price is 13,800 yen + 8% consumption tax so about 14,400 yen or US$130.
It might be possible to find a preowned one on Yahoo Auctions, eBay, etc.

 

[roziek]

Additional question: do you have to connect power to the card, or does it take it straight from the PCI port?

 

[Stratus Fear]

We have a problem with Software Update using this RefiND boot loader method. Although the Software Update mechanism sees the beta 9 update and downloads it, the restart fails to run the installer. There is a brief 2 minute period when the first part of the install completes and then the Mac reboots to complete the full install but the RefiND booter kicks in and the Mac just boots to the previous OS.
Any ideas?

Don't bother, it downloads but the software install is blocked by the RefiND booter for some reason!
It needs a fix or download of a full installer and creation of a USB boot stick again to get the next update.

I finally installed HS with DP8 on my iMac last night on APFS, and got the update to 9 today no problem. Could be your multi-disk issue at play again?