macOS High Sierra (10.13) Unsupported Macs Thread

[jamall]

I was having the exact same problem as Tirapiedras - the verbose log would fill up with "permission denied" errors and it would get stuck at 30% and either crash or hang indefinitely. His report was the only other example I could find that matched my experience so I sent him a PM yesterday to reassure him that he wasn't alone. He replied while I was at work today with a solution: launching the patcher from the terminal using sudo! I can't believe I didn't think to try it myself, but thanks Tirapiedras, you solved a problem that had me stumped for several days!

 

[Hendrik94]

Cant install 10.13 on my MacBookPro 17" mid 2009 tried everything USB Installer is 100% correct when booting from it it ...always this sign..

Is there anything I did wrong.... used the Installer downloaded direct from the Patcher and newest patcher run the Patcher as an Admin tried different USB's....

Current OS is 10.11. SIP is disabled

@dosdude1

 

[dosdude1]

Cant install 10.13 on my MacBookPro 17" mid 2009 tried everything USB Installer is 100% correct when booting from it it ...always this sign..

Is there anything I did wrong.... used the Installer downloaded direct from the Patcher and newest patcher run the Patcher as an Admin tried different USB's....

Current OS is 10.11. SIP is disabled

@dosdude1

View attachment 722377 View attachment 722378



View attachment 722379

Can you boot while holding Command + V, and send a pic of when it hangs?

 

[Hendrik94]

don't know anything about this



an than this




@dosdude1

Could enabled TRIM be a problem on the Systems SSD?

 

[Sevenfeet]

OK, I have what I think is a new problem. Up until now, I've successfully upgraded a MacBook 5,1 and a Mac Pro 3,1 to HS without incident. But my desktop Mac Pro 3,1 is very weird. During the boot process of the USB stick to get to the installer, the boot process crashes with a kernel panic. (generic gray screen with no useful information). This is a machine that has a SoftRAID 5.6.3 volume (RAID 5) which is supposed to be HS compatible. And the boot drive is a Fusion drive. Not sure which (if either) is causing the crash. The video card is a Nvidia 8800 (original Apple) which should be fine.

I could open the case and pull the RAID 5 drives out enough to boot without them and see what happens. I was going to rebuild the array anyway.

Thoughts dosdude1 or anyone else?

OK, I opened up the Mac Pro 3,1 and yanked all of the SoftRaid drives (four of them internal) and tried booting from the USB thumb drive again (this time updated to dosdude1's 2.3.3 version of the installer. Now it is booting without problem, even with the Fusion drive. So I will proceed with the install as soon as I do a proper backup and clean up the disk structure with DiskWarrior. DiskWarrior's boot USB stick doesn't recognize the Fusion drive at all....not sure why.

 

[thewebgal]

I am not sure what to think.
I have a Mac Pro (Early 2009) I bought new. I flashed it to 5,1 last year and got Sierra installed fine.
WiFi was weird so as suggested here, I upgraded the WiFi card in last year as well.
Swapped the main drive for an OtherWorldComputer 6GB SSD. Swapped the original Apple NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 (512MB) with an Apple nVidia GTX 285 1GB Video Card Mac - Both were standard Mac cards available in the MacPros.
It was originally a Quad core 2.66, I installed an upgraded processor card last spring (Hex core 3.33gHz - same family of processors), and all has been well. Upgraded RAM to 24 GB.
Been doing the incremental OSX updates and its at 10.12.6 now. All is happy, mostly.

During the summer I tried to do an upgrade to the HS beta - every attempt crashed and burned, so I'd run Timemachine and get back to where I started. gave up on the betas ...

Monday I tried doing the upgrade to the regular release of High Sierra, but - crash and burn again.
I was just trying to upgrade directly from the Install... app in the Applications folder - after the reboot to start the install, it seemed to get lost - I have tried all kinds of things. I saw there were issues with some SSD - so I pulled the SSD and swapped the original Seagate 1TB drive back into the main drive cage (that drive had been on a shelf for a year so it was on El Capitan).
I used Time machine to "restore" it to my current Sierra 10.12.6 from Monday afternoon - but when I tried to install High Sierra on that config, once it rebooted it gave an error that it was not the proper El Capitan install media (?)
Apparently the Recovery partition on that drive is El Capitan? Did not see a way to change that or to force it to use the High Sierra install app, so I pulled that drive, put the SSD back in, and ran with the Sierra system this week.

Tried to install it again Thursday nigh. Crashed again. During one crash I force it to Terminal mode and decided to check SIP. I had turned it off last year, but - who knows? Ran the csrutil disable command, and - it seemed to accept it!
But attempt to install HS afterwards just gave me the same crash ...

I thought about it and considered that maybe there was a conflict with the "hot-rodded" Hex-core Processor card, so I got a complete (used) early 2009 MacPro 4.1 (2.66 quqd core) from a local shop for cheap, pulled the hex core processor card, and and swapped the Quad core processor card in. Should have been basically like the machine was when new, but with the 5.1 flashed Nvram.

Tried doing the High Sierra standard install last night - once the Apple log is on screen and the progress bar gets about 2/3 - it crashes ... I restored Sierra from Time Machine - and am at a compleete loss where to go next.

 

[Machist]

I also got the red login window on my Mac Pro 3,1 + HD 5770. Interestingly, when I log in remotely the screen is red too. This lead me to think this actually a file or an attibute that could be changed and not a driver arctifact.

Turns out my
/Library/Caches/com.apple.desktop.admin.png
was a single pane red image!

I deleted the image and it solved the red login window. Just resetting your background wallpaper probably also does the trick.

Ok, this work for me also!
So now there is sleep problem and preview (PDF pages turns red!!).
Hope that is general bug and Apple fix that soon.

EDIT:

Also boot is slow again??

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-10-13-high-sierra-bugs-and-bug-fixes.2049327/
"

• Slow boot times with TRIM enabled. Disabling TRIM speeds up boot time.

"

• [Feature?] "Keychain Access" has no menu bar option anymore. [Preferences>General option removed]

 

[Sevenfeet]

OK, I opened up the Mac Pro 3,1 and yanked all of the SoftRaid drives (four of them internal) and tried booting from the USB thumb drive again (this time updated to dosdude1's 2.3.3 version of the installer. Now it is booting without problem, even with the Fusion drive. So I will proceed with the install as soon as I do a proper backup and clean up the disk structure with DiskWarrior. DiskWarrior's boot USB stick doesn't recognize the Fusion drive at all....not sure why.

OK, the second Mac Pro 3,1 is now on High Sierra. In order to do a DiskWarrior clean up of the boot drive, I had to make a new flash boot of the flash drive included with the product. Although it could boot the Mac Pro, the version of OS X it comes with is so old that Fusion drivers weren't a thing. Of course the utility to make a new Diskwarrior boot drive needs a Recovery partition and the one I have is Sierra....which wouldn't boot once it was made into a flash drive. I remade it on my an older iMac in the house still running El Cap, which was new enough to boot the Mac Pro 3,1 as a supported OS.

Once things were clean, the upgrade ran smoothly. Then I reseated the four drives of the RAID 5 and booted. SoftRAID needed to reinstall its main driver after boot but they wasn't difficult.

Everything is back the way it should be. Thanks again dosdude1 and czo.

 

[dandoe]

I have new "red" bugs with Mac Pro 3.1 (Radeon 6870) :
- when I try to use fullscreen app (like mail) I have a "flashing" red full screen. Not very annoying but a bit strange.
- in Preview app with pdf file, when I scroll, some parts of the file are red.

Anyone with this kind of bugs ?

Yes, i have the same problem with red flashing screen in some apps, running High Sierra on a Mac Pro 3.1 and a XFX Radeon HD 6870 (plain PC-version/un-flashed).

I could fix the red login screen thanks to KvR's comment/hint, tho! (thanks a lot KvR)

But i am actually more concerned about the sleep problem, as i always have to quit all apps and power down the Mac whenever i leave the house or go to bed now. (my Mac was running 24/7 prior HS and just went to sleep after one hour inactivity)

I am considering to swap the Radeon HD 6870 with a flashed Nvidia GTX 680.

On eBay i found 2GB and 4GB versions of the GTX 680 (Mac-EFI/flashed). Now i'm not sure which one to choose.

Can someone confirm both GTX 680 versions are working flawlessly with the Mac Pro 3.1 running macOS High Sierra? (the GTX 680 2GB seems to run fine, how about the 4GB one?)

Thanks,
Dan

P.S.: dosdude1, thank you so much for this great piece of code and your support! Also high five to everybody else who helped with comments and hints to keep those old but beloved machines alive and up to date!

 

[KvR]

I have new "red" bugs with Mac Pro 3.1 (Radeon 6870) :
- when I try to use fullscreen app (like mail) I have a "flashing" red full screen. Not very annoying but a bit strange.
- in Preview app with pdf file, when I scroll, some parts of the file are red.
Anyone with this kind of bugs ?

I also have a flashing red when going to full screen. I'm convinced this is also a file or attribute somewhere, because I have the same thing when logged in remotely. I haven't been able to locate the file though. Suggestions are welcome. Just an easier color would be nice.

Just curious did you use the APFS patch?

 

[roziek]

Apologies in advance for this probably dumb question, I just want to make sure I understand correctly.

So I'm trying to install High Sierra on an Early 2009 MacPro (4,1) currently running El Capitan 10.11.6.

I've downloaded the High Sierra installer and patched it with the latest provided utility. I've then used the utility to transfer this to a freshly formatted (OS X Extended, Journaled) 32gb USB thumb drive, which worked fine.

However, whether I reboot and hold option down, or choose the USB thumbdrive as my startup disk in OS X, the only thing I get after rebooting and waiting a while is a black screen.

My GPU is a GeForce GTX 660 Ti.

Do I need to pop in an older GPU in order to make this work? Is there no way to do this headless?

Could I remove my startup HD from my tower, mount it externally on my laptop (already running High Sierra) and update it there?

Or any other possible process that DOESN'T involve switching out the damn GPU?

I ask because I bought this machine in 2009. I really have no idea where the original GPU even is now - that was several moves ago...

Thanks in advance for any ideas!

If you have a 2009 Mac Pro 4,1 you should not be doing any of this stuff.

Like I told @FilthyMuppetInnuendo couple of posts back: any 2009 Mac Pro 4,1 can be flashed to 5,1 — and 5,1 Mac Pros are still officially supported.

So, flash your Mac Pro to 5,1 (plenty of info on that subject on the web) and you'll be able to install Sierra and High Sierra the normal, Apple-sanctioned way — no need to hack around and patch anything. You'll also get a firmware update to be able to natively boot from APFS volumes.

 

[EugW]

MacBook5,1 High Sierra 10.13

Garbled video again, but this time in a YouTube video. It looks just like the garbling that occurs with the iPhone-X video.

This is garbled in both Safari 11 and Firefox 56. It works perfectly fine in Chrome, although it probably is VP9 in Chrome. In Safari it would be h.264, and I assume it is also h.264 for Firefox.

 

[oedipax]

If you have a 2009 Mac Pro 4,1 you should not be doing any of this stuff.

Like I told @FilthyMuppetInnuendo couple of posts back: any 2009 Mac Pro 4,1 can be flashed to 5,1 — and 5,1 Mac Pros are still officially supported.

So, flash your Mac Pro to 5,1 (plenty of info on that subject on the web) and you'll be able to install Sierra and High Sierra the normal, Apple-sanctioned way — no need to hack around and patch anything. You'll also get a firmware update to be able to natively boot from APFS volumes.

I did try that method first - ran into the same issue w.r.t. not having an original GPU, which seems to prevent the flash from working. I'd much rather do it the 5,1 way as well. I guess I could try to eBay a GPU that work, but what a hassle just to run some code one time!

I did manage to get this method working with mounting the drive externally to my laptop and upgrading it there.

 

[ricky_65]

Thank you very much to you Mr. Dosdude1 and all other contributor's that help to make this possible.....


Works Great on my Macbook Pro 5,5..

 

[nekton1]

For various reasons (coughOWCAuraSSdcough) that are too bizarre to explain here (coughOWCAuraspinningdiskSSDcough), I want to run HS on a supported MacBook Pro (2013, 10,1) without running the Apple firmware update to support APFS. I tried using dosdude1's boot patched/installed SSD transplanted from an unsupported Mac Pro 3,1 and it does indeed get the MBP running but with a few quirks (slow acceleration, etc.) at the login screen. Since a supported machine does not need patches other than the APFS fix, would it help to recreate the SSD as usual using the dosdude1 USB booter/installer but then switch off all the patch options except the APFS patch at the post install.
Opinions?

 

[cinergi]

Yeah, unfortunately the APFS booting implementation doesn't support FileVault APFS volumes at this time. If you must use FileVault, you'll need to use an HFS volume. Otherwise, disable FileVault on your APFS volume and it'll work just fine.

Thanks, switched back to HFS for now. I need FileVault since this is a laptop and thus at risk of being stolen when I travel.

Any plans to support Filevault APFS volumes?

Thanks
cinergi

 

[dendkmac]

MacBook5,1 High Sierra 10.13

Garbled video again, but this time in a YouTube video. It looks just like the garbling that occurs with the iPhone-X video.

This is garbled in both Safari 11 and Firefox 56. It works perfectly fine in Chrome, although it probably is VP9 in Chrome. In Safari it would be h.264, and I assume it is also h.264 for Firefox.

I am seeing the same thing...mid 2009 Macbook Pro Nvidia 9600 GT 256mb.

 

[EugW]

I am seeing the same thing...mid 2009 Macbook Pro Nvidia 9600 GT 256mb.

Thanks for the confirmation. Again, just 9400 and 9600 affected. For those of you who haven't seen it, this is the appearance.

 

[JoSch]

Just for understanding the GPU patcher: Is this only needed for the plain PC Radeons, or also for the patched/original Apple Radeons?

 

[Maltaire]

Hi friends,
my MacPro 3.1, early 2008, AMD Radeon HD 7970 ... in the GM version have a black screen when i wake up ... no image; in the beta 1 is this error corrected. Beta 1 is not fully installed on my system... then i have no appstore connection and no Safari connection ... I am waiting for the first legal update now ... ;-).
All my Apps and Games that i have installed into sierra are works without errors into highsierra GM version .

Have a nice day...

 

[thekayman]

Did a straight forward 'upgrade' to High Sierra on my MacbookPro 5,1. All good, except the SSD was not converted to APFS. How do I do that manually?

 

[Maltaire]

[QUOTE = "thekayman, Beitrag: 25154027, Mitglied: 928.617"] Hat ein straight forward 'Upgrade' auf High Sierra auf meinem MacbookPro 5,1. Alles war gut, mit Ausnahme der SSD wurde APFS nicht umgesetzt. Wie mache ich das manuell? [/ QUOTE]

..Disk Utility from hs...your ssd then convert to apfs...

 

[thekayman]

I booted into recovery but the option to convert to apfs is greyed out. I have 3rd party SSD installed. Is there a way to still convert to APFS without doing a complete format of the drive?

 

[virk]

@dosdude1: At first thanks a lot for the perfect work. Secondarily one suggestion: It could be an idea to inform in your "changelog", which files need to be replaced in case a new version of the patcher appears. Would that be possible and/or useful; what do you think?

 

[bmue5]

Installed on MacPro 3.1 with original Apple Radeon 5770
I can confirm the "red" bug, red flashing when opening preview or going into full screen
Also the sleep mode doesn't work anymore :-(
Is there a chance to use the Radeon 5770 in the future without problems or should I switch to Geoforce ?