MP 1,1-5,1 Going from patched Catalina to legit Catalina, and possibly OpenCore?

[epark888]

Hi - long-time lurker, first-time poster here:

I have a 2010 cMP that I installed the DosDude1 Catalina Patcher on last week, dropped in a Pulse RX 580 8GB a couple days ago and just flashed the BootRom to 144.0.0.0.0 last night. I'm not trying to save the world or anything, I use my rig mostly for music production, social media and light gaming. I'd mainly like to optimize the new GPU (acceleration, boot screen, the works) and maybe one day install Windows 10 using Boot Camp (I currently use Parallels).

Problem is, BC Assistant is broken in the patched Catalina and I can't seem to do a clean install of the OS to fix it. Another big issue is that of all the (amazing!) information I've been gleaning about OpenCore, I'm still confused as to how to install it on a cMP already running Catalina. Do I downgrade to Mojave, do I boot to a High Sierra drive, or do I have to start all over with a clean drive? No clue.

Any and all help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance...

 

[h9826790]

How to: Boot Camp without a Boot Screen

I don't remember uninstalling any bootcamp drivers before 6. But I had to uninstall before 6.1

forums.macrumors.com

 

[electonic]

Hey, I am on a 2010, like you.
I left it on 10.14 for a long time, because I really didn't like the thought of SIP disabled and everything you have to sacrifice when using the dosdude solution - as great and appreciated his efforts are.

I was a little skeptical about the OpenCore solution, because it is not "plug and play". You have to do a lot of manual steps. But I took the the time two weekends ago and I am so happy. It is like a native Mac OS. Really great. Everything works.software updates work. And I even upgraded the Wifi card now and now I have AirDrop!

Just remember that 99% sure you will looseWifi with Catalina, if you go open core, because the drivers for the default card are not in Catalina anymore. You would have to go external / ethernet or upgrade the Wifi Cards which will be additional money spend. For me, it was well worth it. Wifi AC in Mac Pro is v very nice
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And, sorry, yes: Boot Camp is a problem. You will have to Install Windows without Bootcamp. But that works out fine and there a lot of guides that will help you with it. Just put it on its own drive. You've got room in that Mac Pro case for drive just for Windows, right? I've got a cheap 240gb Ssd for Windows gaming in there.
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Do I downgrade to Mojave, do I boot to a High Sierra drive, or do I have to start all over with a clean drive? No clue.

To go OpenCore you should go with a clean drive:
- Only have two drives in your Mac to do it the save way: 1. Empty drive where your OS should be installed on. 2. Drive with a working Mac OS installation. Doesn't matter which version
- You will start installation from a running Mac OS version. You will only need that briefly at beginning of the process. Doesn't matter which version: I did it from Mojave.

I had my system on Mojave: I cloned my running system with Carbon Copy Cloner to a spare old disk I had, booted from that. Reformated my boot SSD and started the process from the cloned Mac OS from old HD with the cloned Mac OS copy. So fresh Catalina through the OpenCore route. Then I copied all data in needed onto Catalina Drive, when I was finished. Took me 2-3 hours in total.

 

[epark888]

Well thanks to your info (and a whole lot of patience) I was able to get OpenCore up and running last night! I also got a lot of assistance from this source that put me on to Clover Configurator which cut down tremendously on the amount of coding involved. Here's how I did it:

I found an SSD with High Sierra on it, bumped it up to Mojave and installed it along with a clean SSD for Catalina. I then used CC from this OpenCore 0.5.8 kit to mount/bless the EFI, rebooted, used CC again to edit the config.plist for RadeonBoost, added the RadeonBoost kext and rebooted again. Success.

Once I was confident enough, I removed the fresh drive and repeated the same process on my main drive - this time referring back to the OpenCore thread on how to toggle the VMM flag to get legit Catalina Updates. Again, a success.

So I ended up with:

* A genuine 10.15.5 OS.
* Accelerated RX 580 graphics.
* A smoother Parallels Win10 experience - but I will be going to a legit Win10 install in the near future.

I also ended up with:

* No boot screen yet, probably because my monitor is actually a TV - it throws up an "unsupport" message instead.
* No control over scaling with the RX 580 - I lose the menu bar if I go to to a higher resolution and my "monitor" has no adjustment to fix it.
* Surprise surprise, WiFi is nuked. Not an urgent problem since I use Ethernet, but a card upgrade is definitely needed.

Overall it was a fun day nerding out over my rig - I learned a lot and was able to breathe a little more life into my faithful cMP. Thanks again for your help...