Resolved OS X Yosemite on Unsupported Macs [Guide]

[gothic_ru]

How can return back Lion at least? I don't have a recovery disk

 

[dimas_bog]

Hello. I installed Yosemity 10.10.4 on my mybook 4,1. but I have two problems. Sleep mode does not work, as I understand it dares program nosleep. And one problem that I have is not working brightness control. Is there a solution to this problem

 

[gulufo]

Hello. I installed Yosemity 10.10.4 on my mybook 4,1. but I have two problems. Sleep mode does not work, as I understand it dares program nosleep. And one problem that I have is not working brightness control. Is there a solution to this problem

These are known problems. See post #1

 

[gulufo]

How can return back Lion at least? I don't have a recovery disk

Since you chose clean instal on the same partition, according to your earlier post, you shouldn't be expecting to get Lion back with or without a recovery partition! You erased it and tried to install Yosemite on top of it.
See if your situation is salvageable by following the instructions on post #1 (If Reboots Fail..) and or Post #846.
Please tell me you have TimeMachine and/ or Clone of your original partition!

 

[dimas_bog]

These are known problems. See post #1

Sorry,I can't find enything about unworking backlight(

 

[gothic_ru]

Since you chose clean instal on the same partition, according to your earlier post, you shouldn't be expecting to get Lion back with or without a recovery partition! You erased it and tried to install Yosemite on top of it.
See if your situation is salvageable by following the instructions on post #1 (If Reboots Fail..) and or Post #864.
Please tell me you have TimeMachine and/ or Clone of your original partition!

You probably meant Post #846. Yes, I do have 4 Gb memory installed and I removed 2Gb, but that doesn't help.

For the Post #1 I tried to do

sudo rm /Volumes/[Main Drive Name]/System/Library/CoreServices/PlatformSupport.plist

But it was empty already (/Volumes).

Unfortunately I don't have TimeMachine or Clone of my original partition. And Command-R doesn't work.
What option do I have to unbrick it to any OS X?

 

[gulufo]

You probably meant Post #846. Yes, I do have 4 Gb memory installed and I removed 2Gb, but that doesn't help.

For the Post #1 I tried to do

sudo rm /Volumes/[Main Drive Name]/System/Library/CoreServices/PlatformSupport.plist

But it was empty already (/Volumes).

Unfortunately I don't have TimeMachine or Clone of my original partition. And Command-R doesn't work.
What option do I have to unbrick it to any OS X?

I am not sure what you mean by unbricking your mac. Would you kindly post some screenshots so we can know where exactly you are "stuck"?

 

[gulufo]

Sorry,I can't find enything about unworking backlight(

Some of the known bugs are listed in post #1 include "sleep" problem, screen resolution and video playing issues.
Also post #219, #222 has to do with backlight issues.
What video card do you have, and how many mb Graphics are showing under "about this Mac"?

 

[dimas_bog]

Some of the known bugs are listed in post #1 include "sleep" problem, screen resolution and video playing issues.
Also post #219, #222 has to do with backlight issues.
What video card do you have, and how many mb Graphics are showing under "about this Mac"?

Thanks, gma x3100 144 mb

 

[unrealSpeedy]

Good evening to all!
Thank you very much for your nice Solutions and Tutorials!

I am now working on my lovely and 9(!) Years old Mac Mini 2006 with GMA950 and now Yosemite

Everything is working fine, but there is one question:
There is an Softwareupdate for OS X 10.4. If i install this update, will the OS and the Mac still boot or will the Update destroy the System?

Thank you very much!

 

[TMRJIJ]

Good evening to all!
Thank you very much for your nice Solutions and Tutorials!

I am now working on my lovely and 9(!) Years old Mac Mini 2006 with GMA950 and now Yosemite

Everything is working fine, but there is one question:
There is an Softwareupdate for OS X 10.4. If i install this update, will the OS and the Mac still boot or will the Update destroy the System?

Thank you very much!

You can install the combo update and delete the PlatformSupport.plist from the single user mode upon restarting.
I am working on an automation of this in OSXE1.3

 

[Johnno1546]

Hi all, I am new to Mac Pro's, I have acquired Mac Pro 2006 in the overview it states its a 2.1 with Quad Core Intel Xeon Processors 2.66 with 8gb Memory, I was also given a flash drive with Sfott 64/32 on it with Yosemite 10.10 I duly installed it and all is well except that an update came up and I installed it, now it won't boot up, I took out the hard drive and wiped it and re-installed, I understand from this forum I have to alter a couple of things so updates will go in okay.

Can anyone advise me on what to download and if possible post a link and give me instructions on what to do?

Many thanks guys

Johnno

 

[Dorog]

Hello to all,

thank you for your work and support for older macs. I want to install Yosemite on my MacBook Early 2008 White and have a short question about the known bugs.
What dose "one screen resolution" exactly mean? It would be great if 1280x800 is still possible on the internal display. Additionally, is it possible to use an external display too with e.g. 1080p via the mini dvi adapter?
Am I able to restore the MacBook to 10.7.5 with my disk or recovery partition if something goes wrong? I would do a backup before the Yosemite installation and have original disks. Can i easily switch between OS versions with different HDDs? Like one HDD with Yosemite and another one with 10.7.5 or dose the changed efi deny such quick hdd switch?

Thank you very much.
Best regards.

 

[jon8214]

Hi everyone i have been having a nightmare trying to get yosemite installed on my MB 2,1 i have tried OS X extractor ,cps and also sfott beta to no avail, i cannot even get it to recognise my boot usb any one have any ideas, thanks in advance

Finally got it sorted i needed to use usb install and change the efi, its now working fine but i get a message saying activation failure for iMessage and ft, i don't get a code with it to call apple, any ideas and thank you

 

[unrealSpeedy]

You can install the combo update and delete the PlatformSupport.plist from the single user mode upon restarting.
I am working on an automation of this in OSXE1.3

Thank you very much, I will give it a try today

There is a additional Question
Yosemite is running quite stable, but the System could run "smoother" i think.
I have running the original 5400rpm HDD (with first SMART errors ), i will replace this with a SSD.
And my Mini is running with the GMA950 without graphics acceleration.

What do you guys think is the Graphics card the point which slows down my System, or is it the HDD?
Is there some useful Benchmark to test this?
Maybe it would be worth to use a display link usb-adapter instead of the GMA950, should i give it a try?

Thank you

 

[RV-ABZ]

[...]
What do you guys think is the Graphics card the point which slows down my System, or is it the HDD?
[...]

Of course it is the GPU. You have no graphics acceleration for obsolete Intel GMAs and never will, so graphics can only be handled (or not at all) by the little C2D CPU. There is no solution to that problem...

 

[unrealSpeedy]

Of course it is the GPU. You have no graphics acceleration for obsolete Intel GMAs and never will, so graphics can only be handled (or not at all) by the little C2D CPU. There is no solution to that problem...

Maybach there will be a Solution by using an displaylink Adapter over USB? Thats nothing for Gaming and HD Movies, bunt it could work for normal using.

Of course the Update from 10.10.3 to 10.10.5 crashed my System, there is no boot possible, still after removing the platformsupport.plist. There is only the blinking folder with an questionmark (no bootable Partition). Even the recovery Partition is not working.
Surprisingly I cannot do a blank install of Lion in this harddrive (the installer crashes).
At the Moment i am trying to install Lion om an external drive, looks like this works.
So i think my HDD is gone (Even of diskutility says its ok) and i will Never the less need a new drive (a SSD this Time )

Edit: Sorry for Bad Writing, im Writing on an iPad with German autocorrect :/

Best wishes

 

[chmedly]

Of course the Update from 10.10.3 to 10.10.5 crashed my System, there is no boot possible, still after removing the platformsupport.plist. There is only the blinking folder with an questionmark (no bootable Partition).

I got 10.10.5 running. I didn't do anything with the platformsupport.plist. I simply had to install a working boot.efi file.

I have a late 2006 17" MacBookPro2,1 with ATI X1600 graphics. I had trouble making a usb Yosemite installer that would actually boot on this machine. I ended up pulling the hard drive (with Lion 10.7.5 on it) and installing an SSD. Then, I booted the Lion disk in an external enclosure and used MacPostFactor to install Yosemite 10.10.1 on the SSD. Initially the graphics were flaky and mouse movements were rough. I ran the Sudo Nvram boot-args command and erroneously installed the x1600 kexts (they were already installed by MacPostFactor). After that things were pretty good except that 2 finger scrolling was almost completely unusable in Google Chrome. I decided to try an update to the latest version of Yosemite (10.10.5). I first copied the boot.efi file to the desktop, as a previous poster suggested and then went to the app store and ran the updater. Upon reboot, it wouldn't. I instead booted the Lion disk and copied the boot.efi back to the coreservices folder and then I was able to boot it to Yosemite. I found that the graphics card was only registering 6mb of ram and there was some artifacting. I also had no sound. So I ran the kext tool and installed the Apple HDA kext. Before rebooting I played around with some things and found that scrolling in Google Chrome was much better than previous. But after a reboot, the graphics showed 256mb of ram and artifacting was gone. The computer seems rather snappy except for Chrome. Safari is really quick and smooth but Chrome is a complete dog. This is a problem because Chrome is my main browser. So, I'm wondering what it is about Chrome that's not happy and if I might be better off without the modified kext files.

 

[chmedly]

So, I've been poking around a bit. In Chrome I went to chrome://gpu to see if hardware acceleration was working. To my surprise, most of it was! The only thing that was not enabled on the unsupported Yosemite that was enabled on my other macs was Multiple Raster Threads. I tried enabling it with chrome://flags. I set it to 2 but didn't find any differences in behavior. It seems like everything in Chrome is just 10 times slower than in Safari from loading pages to scrolling to the frame rate for youtube.

 

[gpatpandp]

So, I've been poking around a bit. In Chrome I went to chrome://gpu to see if hardware acceleration was working. To my surprise, most of it was! The only thing that was not enabled on the unsupported Yosemite that was enabled on my other macs was Multiple Raster Threads. I tried enabling it with chrome://flags. I set it to 2 but didn't find any differences in behavior. It seems like everything in Chrome is just 10 times slower than in Safari from loading pages to scrolling to the frame rate for youtube.

In attempting to find a solution to movie streaming (i.e. putlocker, solarmovie etc.), I just completed the process of installing Chrome after which a few minutes later, I promptly deleted it as it offered no better performance then Safari in that department either. Every "blue moon" I am able to stream a movie and after expanding the viewing window, the film will play smoothly without sputtering. Nine times out of Ten however the movie will stream fine inside the browser though once I expand the viewing window, the play back immediately becomes choppy and begins sputtering. I was hoping Chrome might resolve this but unfortunately it performed identically to Safari in the same circumstances.

 

[RV-ABZ]

Yes, that is "standard/regular" behaviour when there is no graphics acceleration. Nothing you can really do about it unfortunately...

 

[chmedly]

Yes, that is "standard/regular" behaviour when there is no graphics acceleration. Nothing you can really do about it unfortunately...

I assume you're referring to getpatpandp's issue with video playback? I don't think I have such lofty goals by comparison. I don't need smooth full screen video play back. I'm actually thrilled with how well this old machine does with Safari. It's just that I rely on a few features of Chrome in such a way that I'd really like to find a solution.

 

[RV-ABZ]

You would assume correctly but be careful with OS X because:

 

[Sudo Bless]

Hi. This is my first post here. I've posted it on Facebook already on OS X Hackers page, but since the original post is here, just thought it would be ok to share this info here.

I'm not pretending to be a Professor OS X Hacker, but I've made some progress today in installing and successfully updating a very old Macbook Air Original, and I would like to share this info with you.

If you already got installed the desired OS X on your unsupported Mac, and have it running just jump straight to the p.7

1. Before proceed, I've created a common boot USB from latest and official Yosemite available on my newer Macbook. Or just use some 10.10.4 available to download from anywhere else or even directly from the App Store itself.
This is to have a bootable non-altered Mac Utilites when booting from this USB. Also, it helps to avoid booting in Single mode and still to be able
access installation disk and make modifications on it.

2. After revealing all hidden files on the created bootable USB with DisAppear.app, I've modified these two values in /System/Library/CoreServices/PlatformSupport.plist:
SupportedBoardIds and SupportedModelProperties by adding my unsupported Mac's Board Id and Model.
It's possible to do either with IORegistryExplorer.app or running these commands from Terminal:
To get Board ID: ioreg -l | grep board-id; To get Model: ioreg -l | grep product-name

2a. Alternatively, you could use any other Linux computer/installation to mount this bootable USB in RW mode and edit it from there (if you want to).

3. To proceed with the OS X install, follow the installation guide from here: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/os-x-yosemite-on-unsupported-macs-guide.1761432/

4. After finishing the install, newly installed system didn't booted at once (in my case). So, I used my "official" bootable USB to get to the
Terminal Utility and removing the PlatformSupport.plist (without sudo): rm /Volumes/[Main Drive Name]/System/Library/CoreServices/PlatformSupport.plist

5. Before reboot, I ran Drive Repair and Permission Repair from the Disk Utility on the same USB. The system rebooted, and I was able to access my new installation. Allow some time, at this point the system might be really slow.

6. To improve things, I've performed all this magic to fix graphic issues with Kexts for my Graphic Card, also I've disabled animation, font aliasing, transparency, magnification, and recent items history. Reboot the system.


Update process:

7. Once system is booted and working well (except Maps, and some other known issues), I've ran the OS X Update Combined 10.10.5 from AppStore.
After the update is finished, the system stopped to boot again. So, I've rebooted it from the "official" USB and performed the same operations as after the install.

8. First, I've removed the PlatformSupport.plist using the Terminal from Utilities Menu (no sudo, just simple 'rm') - see p. 4.

9. Then, I've ran the Disk Repair and Permission Repair once again - see p.5

10. Shut down the system, remove any connected USB, power the system back on - and voilà. It booted into 10.10.5.

11. One strange thing happened to me after I've made backup with Time Machine, the system fell asleep, although NoSleep was active.
After I was unable to wake it up, it stopped to boot again, and I had to fix permissions from my bootable USB once more.
After fixing permissions, and booting up the system, I lost the sound. I think, there was some process applied by the new update that screwed the whole thing up.

12. Since the sound was gone, I had to re-deploy the AppleHDA.kext using KextUtility.app (see the Official Guide, part E). And it fixed the issue.

13. I've proceeded with the rest of Updates, updating Recovery, RAW Camera Compatibility, iTunes etc.

14. After reboot, all worked fine and now I have the oldest in the history of Human kind Macbook Air Original, with the latest OS X from Apple creators

15. Some problems you'd have:
a) Video reproduction that requires Video Acceleration is unavailable. That's what causes iTunes crash when trying play HD videos. Youtube and Vimeo work fine, of course.
b) Sometimes the Kernel is panicking, and machine reboots at startup. Doesn't happen very frequently.
c) Maps are not displaying.

Pros: After the Update I have three different Video resolutions available. Thing I didn't had with the original install. Of course, the lowest ones are a bit blurry, but performance is much better. I'm kind of got used to it.

Thank you for your time.

 

[pford]

Greeting,

I am attempting to get Yosemite to run on my old Mac Pro 1,1. I've already upgraded the video card to an ATI Radeon HD5770 1GB Video Card and have a copy of 10.10.5 on an external firewire drive installed using the reinstall option from the recovery drive on a MacBook Pro. The MacBook Pro booted successfully from this installation. After using the Pike's boot.efi and the script installer and I get the screen below. After much fiddling around I have not gotten much further. P

Is this an issue with having installed 10.10.5 from a MacBook Pro or are there other things I need to be trying.

Thanks in advance