Opencore on 2010 MacBook Pro

[ww2_1943]

I’m trying to install multiple bootable partitions on a mid 2010 MacBook Pro 13 inch. I’m having trouble with getting Monterey to boot with OpenCore. It’s my first time using it. I watched some videos and read through the instructions but I think I’m still doing something wrong. My ultimate goal is to have 10.6, 10.13, 12.5, and Windows 10 all bootable. I just installed a new 500 GB Samsung SSD and 16gb of ram.

First, I made two partitions in HFS Extended. The first one is 100 GB and the second one 400GB. I installed 10.6.8 on each partition. The 100GB partition is my permanent 10.6 partition.

On the second partition I updated to 10.10 I think. Then from there 10.13. At this point the second partition is formatted in APFS.

I made a new APFS volume to install 12.5 using OpenCore. I downloaded OpenCore and used it to download 12.5. I made the installer USB as per instructions. Monterey seemed to install but after it installed I got the Prohibitory Disk Black Access Screen. I manually shutdown and then restarted. Went back to the new volume which now said Monterey Install with the dual disk drive icons. It did another install, maybe the patches? Rebooted and the name changes to Macintosh HD which is what I named the volume. I got the same Prohibitory Disk Black Access Screen.

I restarted and tried booting several more times with the same results.

What does the issue sounds like? Should I have made another partition in APFS instead of a volume? Maybe I need to make the install usb again?

 

[Grumpus]

What does the issue sounds like? Should I have made another partition in APFS instead of a volume? Maybe I need to make the install usb again?

Yes, try creating a new partition, formatted as APFS using the OCLP Monterey installer, rather than trying to install into the High Sierra volume. You'll lose the ability to share the space in the High Sierra partition, but I suspect you're running into problems due to the many changes to APFS between High Sierra and Monterey.

I have Monterey running, via OCLP, on this mid-2010 15" MBP, and I occasionally boot High Sierra from a USB-attached SSD. Other than High Sierra complaining that it can't recognize the Monterey APFS filesystem, everything works fine. Monterey, on the other hand, has no problem reading the High Sierra APFS volume. So it's backwards compatible, but not forward compatible.

If you want to experiment, you could also try installing High Sierra into a Monterey APFS volume, but two completely separate partitions seems to me to be the better bet.

 

[Grumpus]

Installing High Sierra to a new Monterey APFS volume seems to work fine. High Sierra displays an "incompatible disk" alert on the desktop, which you can ignore. And you can't change the startup disk in the High Sierra settings to the Monterey disk, but rebooting with the option key pressed lets you boot back to Monterey with no problem.

 

[ww2_1943]

Thank you for the feedback. Should I install Monterey over my current high sierra installation? And then install high sierra on the volume made in Monterey?

I’m thinking for the purpose of utilizing space that is probably my better option than making a separate partition

 

[Grumpus]

Thank you for the feedback. Should I install Monterey over my current high sierra installation? And then install high sierra on the volume made in Monterey?

That's what I would try. Also, when you create the new volume for High Sierra take a look at the size options. You can set an initial size, and a quota (i.e. maximum size).

EDIT: I should amend that - you want to get rid of the old High Sierra APFS filesystem, i.e. don't try to install Monterey over it. It's important to have the latest APFS version for Monterey.

 

[ww2_1943]

That's what I would try. Also, when you create the new volume for High Sierra take a look at the size options. You can set an initial size, and a quota (i.e. maximum size).

EDIT: I should amend that - you want to get rid of the old High Sierra APFS filesystem, i.e. don't try to install Monterey over it. It's important to have the latest APFS version for Monterey.

Right, that makes sense. So should I just reformat the partition in macOS extended? And then use the Monterey installer

 

[Grumpus]

Right, that makes sense. So should I just reformat the partition in macOS extended? And then use the Monterey installer

That sounds right to me.

 

[ww2_1943]

Still no luck. Here is what I did.

1. Remade the boot installer USB.
2. Once booted into the installer, I erased the OS 10.13 partition and formatted it in APFS.
3. Installed, during the first reboot i got the Prohibitory Disk Black Access Screen.
4. Rebooted holding option and went into EFI boot
5. Selected the Mac Installer partition with the two disks
6. It went through another install process (maybe the opencore post install stuff?)
7. Rebooted and Prohibitory Disk Black Access Screen
8. Rebooted and held option, went to boot efi, and then booted from Macintosh HD with the two disks
9. Prohibitory Disk Black Access Screen

 

[ww2_1943]

I can see that the volumes were created and the OS was installed.

 

[Grumpus]

I don't know what happened, sorry. In my experience, several reboots happen during an OCLP Monterey install, and each reboot took place with no intervention on my part. Maybe you've seen it already, but Mr. Macintosh has an excellent video walking you through the entire process.

Were I in your shoes, I'd start over. First, I would reset the NVRAM and reset the SMC of the laptop, just to be starting from a clean slate. Then start the OCLP Monterey install again, but this time erase the entire drive. The reboot(s) during the installation shouldn't require any manual intervention. After the Monterey install is complete, OCLP should prompt you regarding booting from disk rather than the installer USB, so just follow the prompt. Also, Mr. Macintosh shows how to set the default boot device in the video.

Once Monterey is up and running, use disk utility to partition the drive to make room for Snow Leopard and whatever else you have planned. Leave enough room for Monterey + High Sierra. Use disk utility to create a new volume inside the Monterey container for High Sierra. Now do your High Sierra install.

When Monterey and High Sierra are working, you can turn your attention to Snow Leopard.

EDIT: Maybe it is better to install Snow Leopard first, just to insure that it doesn't mess with whatever OCLP does to the EFI. Me, when it comes to more than a couple of OSes on the same disk, I'm a fan of VirtualBox

 

[ww2_1943]

No worries, I appreciate all the help.

I did watch Mr. Macintosh's video several times. I figured something was wrong when it wouldn’t reboot on its own like in the video.

At this point I have nothing to lose and could just reformat the entire drive to run SL.

Before I embarked on this project, I was running Catalina with Dod Dude’s patcher and HS on a separate volume. I also had Windows 10 on there. Maybe I should start with Catalina? My guess is I will still have the same issue, but who knows

 

[Grumpus]

I still think it's worth resetting NVRAM and SMC, that has cleared up mysterious boot failures for me several times in the past, and it can't hurt (to the best of my meager knowledge).

 

[theMarble]

Just to put it out there, I've got a 2010 MacBook (White, not Pro, but same CPU and GPU) and it's running OpenCore with both Snow Leopard and Big Sur underneath it.

I used USB to install Big Sur through OpenCore Legacy Patcher, did all of the updates (11.6.5 at the time, now 11.6.8), partitioned the SSD outside of the APFS container and made a GPT HFS+ (Mac OS Extended Journaled) partition, from there I installed Snow Leopard from USB. Works great now.

 

[Grumpus]

I used USB to install Big Sur through OpenCore Legacy Patcher, did all of the updates (11.6.5 at the time, now 11.6.8), partitioned the SSD outside of the APFS container and made a GPT HFS+ (Mac OS Extended Journaled) partition, from there I installed Snow Leopard from USB. Works great now.

Cool, thanks, good to know!

 

[ww2_1943]

Just to put it out there, I've got a 2010 MacBook (White, not Pro, but same CPU and GPU) and it's running OpenCore with both Snow Leopard and Big Sur underneath it.

I used USB to install Big Sur through OpenCore Legacy Patcher, did all of the updates (11.6.5 at the time, now 11.6.8), partitioned the SSD outside of the APFS container and made a GPT HFS+ (Mac OS Extended Journaled) partition, from there I installed Snow Leopard from USB. Works great now.

View attachment 2046418 View attachment 2046419

That was going to be my next try! I am going to wipe the drive and just install Monterey and SL after

 

[jaxparo]

Didn't read posts carefully, sorry if in error. My experiences on old Macs with patchers: 1st: make sure firmware on old Mac is latest available. Often that involves upgrading to the last supported version of MacOS, since later MacOS software only had the firmware updates as part of system software updates, not as stand-alone firmware updaters, so in your case, you might need to have installed a 10.13.6 High Sierra installation in order to be certain of the latest firmware version? 2nd: DosDude's patchers are incompatible with OpenCore Legacy Patcher, so if you have multiple partitions using both, when you use the Option key boot, select any DosDude partition directly, never with an OpenCore first. When booting OpenCore installations, sometimes it doesn't complete the patching process, which requires booting from the Installer USB EFI partition first, which then gives a 2nd selection to the installed partition, to then select the installed partition and boot. Sometimes this doesn't work, I often use the verbose boot to 'see' what the issue is, on older Macs the 'legacy USB bus' often causes a stall in the boot process which will result in a non-boot. Sometimes disconnecting a USB device might help the boot. Perhaps zap PRAM and try again, sometimes it takes a few tries. If you ever upgrade a partition from a DosDude Catalina patcher to an OpenCore Legacy, you MUST remove ALL the DosDude patches, preferences, etc. from the upgraded partition. Also, maybe download a 12.5.1 (21G83) installer and reinstall rather than proceeding with your 12.5 (21G72) and then updating. After installation, I think you'll need to do the OpenCore Legacy Patcher root kernel patches for graphics & wifi?

 

[ww2_1943]

I successful booted into Monterey!
I’m not sure what I did that made that happen. It’s one of two things.
1. I installed Catalina with Dos Dudes patcher. Then downloaded opencore and did the Monterey install.
2. At some point during the process in 1, I installed just the OpenCore EFI stuff on a USB and then was able to boot into 12.5 from there.

My new issues-
1. I wiped the drive completely before I installed Catalina with the Dos Dude Patcher. I know that I could make a partition later for Snow Leopard. I figured installing High Sierra after installing Catalina shouldn’t be a problem. I did it previously without issue. I planned on deleting the volume with Catalina after I installed 10.13.

2. After installing 10.13 (HS), I got an Incompatible disk warning. I understand why I have that warning. It likely a result of Monterey already being installed on the disk (remember, I didn’t have this issue when I installed HS after installing Catalina previously).

3. Can I ignore the message? Will some kind of corruption occur? Or does the message basically mean I can’t take advantage of the never version of APFS that installed with Monterey?

I can wipe the drive and start again by installing the OS in order, but I’m afraid I’m going to have trouble getting Monterey to install and boot again. It took me days to get it booting.

 

[Grumpus]

Howard Oakley gives a thumbnail history of APFS in this blog article. Since HS, features have been added to support the splitting of the system volume into read-only and read-write parts and presenting those two parts as a single root filesystem in Finder. You're seeing the Incompatible Disk message because HS has mounted a volume which was created by a newer version of APFS.

I see the same message, as I mentioned previously, and I haven't seen any corruption or other problems, but I've been careful to avoid accessing the Monterey volumes from HS. Trying to avoid mounting the Monterey volumes in HS by putting 'noauto' entries in /etc/fstab didn't work for me, so I just hid them from the desktop:

sudo SetFile -a V /Volumes/Monterey\ HD\ -\ Data
sudo SetFile -a V /Volumes/Update
killall Finder

The Update volume appeared after I installed all of the available HS updates. SetFile is part of the Xcode command line developer tools.

My disk layout looks like this:

grumpus$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI ⁨EFI⁩                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS ⁨Container disk1⁩         499.9 GB   disk0s2

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +499.9 GB   disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume ⁨Monterey HD - Data⁩      44.8 GB    disk1s1
   2:                APFS Volume ⁨Preboot⁩                 316.4 MB   disk1s2
   3:                APFS Volume ⁨Recovery⁩                1.6 GB     disk1s3
   4:                APFS Volume ⁨VM⁩                      4.3 GB     disk1s4
   5:                APFS Volume ⁨Monterey HD⁩             15.7 GB    disk1s5
   6:              APFS Snapshot ⁨com.apple.bless.1FB4...⁩ 15.7 GB    disk1s5s1
   7:                APFS Volume ⁨High Sierra HD⁩          14.5 GB    disk1s7

Notice that the HS volume is inside the container created by the Monterey disk utility app, and consequently both HS and Monterey volumes are in the same partition. Also notice that the Monterey root filesystem is split into two volumes, Monterey HD (read-only) and Monterey HD - Data (writable).

I haven't tried putting Monterey and HS into two completely separate partitions (yet). That's less space efficient, but might be a little safer.

What does your disk layout look like? What is the Untitled disk shown on your HS desktop?

 

[Grumpus]

Are you having to boot Monterey using the OCLP installation USB? If so, watch the Mr. Macintosh video again, starting at 18:58.

 

[ww2_1943]

I haven't tried putting Monterey and HS into two completely separate partitions (yet). That's less space efficient, but might be a little safer.

What does your disk layout look like? What is the Untitled disk shown on your HS desktop?

This is really informative! I was thinking of putting HS on its on partition but as you said, it’s not as space efficient.

To answer your last question, I do not need the USB to boot. I installed the EFI boot loader to the HD.

Here is the disk layout- Macintosh HD is Catalina. My naming is a mess. I would have done this differently if I knew that Monterey was finally going to work at this point.

Here is the Update drive

 

[Grumpus]

You can change the names of your volumes in the disk utility app - in the left pane, click on a volume name to select it, then in the menu bar select File->Rename. Then type the new name in the name field in the right panel. Or, easier still, just click on the name in the right panel and edit it directly.

I'm a little surprised that you could install Catalina followed by Monterey with their volumes sharing the same container without running into a problem (I would have chosen Monterey followed by Catalina). APFS changed for both Big Sur and Monterey. Catalina has the split System and Data volume scheme, with System mounted read-only. Big Sur and Monterey do that and also cryptographically sign and "seal" the System volume, snapshotting that and booting the snapshot, all in the name of increased security. If counting sheep doesn't do it for you tonight, take a look at the Apple File System Reference Anyway, if what you've done works, it works!

Earlier I made a small, separate partition on my drive and installed HS to it. Alas, that also mounts the Monterey volumes, just like the HS that lives in the Monterey APFS container, so that's not a way to avoid the Incompatible Disk message.

 

[ww2_1943]

UPDATE-

I installed a spare 128GB SSD to mess around with. I was afraid that I might not get Monetary to boot again if I cleared the 500GB SSD that I was working with. Here is what I did-

1. Formatted the drive in APFS from a 10.13 usb installer.
2. Installed 10.13 from a bootable USB
3. Downloaded OpenCore and made a bootable install USB
4. Installed OS 12 and it worked fine.
5. Booted back into 10.13 and I get the disk warning!

Here is what I think might work. Install 10.13 and 12 in their own containers. But, I will lose the shared memory the same as if I partitioned the drive. I think I am going to test this theory out. I will create a new container and install HS in it. Even if it works, I don't think I am going to have enough space on a 500GB SSD to install 10.6, 10.13, 12, and Windows 10- which was my original plan.

My new plan for the 500GB drive- Install OS 12, make a 100GB partition for OS 10.6 (I really want a computer that runs it), use Boot Camp from OS 12 to install a 150 GB Windows 10 partition. Depending on how my container test on this 128GB drive goes, I may install 10.13 on the 500GB drive after I get a better feel for how much space I will need.

Also, if this container test works, I may want to look into a larger SSD. I just don't want to spend any more money on this!

 

[ww2_1943]

I just realized making a new container is making a new APFS partition, which makes sense now that I think about it! And you already said that did not prevent the disk message from appearing.

Now I have to decide if I want 10.13 and 12 on here at the same time.

 

[avz]

UPDATE-

I installed a spare 128GB SSD to mess around with. I was afraid that I might not get Monetary to boot again if I cleared the 500GB SSD that I was working with. Here is what I did-

1. Formatted the drive in APFS from a 10.13 usb installer.
2. Installed 10.13 from a bootable USB
3. Downloaded OpenCore and made a bootable install USB
4. Installed OS 12 and it worked fine.
5. Booted back into 10.13 and I get the disk warning!

Here is what I think might work. Install 10.13 and 12 in their own containers. But, I will lose the shared memory the same as if I partitioned the drive. I think I am going to test this theory out. I will create a new container and install HS in it. Even if it works, I don't think I am going to have enough space on a 500GB SSD to install 10.6, 10.13, 12, and Windows 10- which was my original plan.

My new plan for the 500GB drive- Install OS 12, make a 100GB partition for OS 10.6 (I really want a computer that runs it), use Boot Camp from OS 12 to install a 150 GB Windows 10 partition. Depending on how my container test on this 128GB drive goes, I may install 10.13 on the 500GB drive after I get a better feel for how much space I will need.

Also, if this container test works, I may want to look into a larger SSD. I just don't want to spend any more money on this!

How about the Apple Maps and FileVault? Does it work well under Big Sur or Monterey on you unsupported Mac?

 

[ww2_1943]

How about the Apple Maps and FileVault? Does it work well under Big Sur or Monterey on you unsupported Mac?

I don’t know since I haven’t really tested much as far as how well the OS really operates (no pun intended!). I’ve been more concerned with figuring out how to get multiple boot volumes to work.

I’ll give maps a try tomorrow though and let you know. File Vault works fine as far as I can tell.