(How) can I remove all dosdude patches from my Mac without wiping the disk?

[Oxygeneralist]

My old Mac ran Sierra and then High Sierra with the aid of @dosdude1 patches. I have bought a newer Mac which supports the latest OS. For its initial setup, I restored it from a Time Machine backup of used Migration Assistant to copy everything from my patched Mac. I then upgraded the newer Mac to Mojave, and have just installed Catalina. The problem is, I can't reenable SIP* and I still get the boot screen with a black background, which indicates to me that one or more dosdude1 patches are installed.

So, how can I completely remove all dosdude1 patches? I'd prefer to avoid wiping the internal disk to do a clean install of 10.15, because I guess that backing the newer Mac up with Time Machine and then restoring from that backup will leave me with the same problem. And, if I do do a clean install, I would have to spend a lot of time downloading and installing software and adjusting settings.

*In the recovery partition, running csrutil enable appears to work but on booting back into the main OS it remains disabled.

 

[tyc0746]

You could use migration assistant to copy over the relevant files from your old computer, instead of doing a Time Machine restore.

That way you'd have a clean system, and could copy over only the bits you want to (apps, docs, bookmarks, etc.).

 

[MacUser2525]

Do the clean install then use the backup to migrate your user and software only, no system files. Either this or boot old system take a look at the patches and manually revert the changes.

Edit: oops should have previewed to see the other posting the same at the same time .

 

[Oxygeneralist]

Thanks @tyc0746 and @MacUser2525, I'll give that a try. The mentions of Migration Assistant have triggered my memory – I did in fact use that utility to set up the newer Mac, not Time Machine.

I've wiped the old system and installed El Capitan on it, so I can't revert the changes (and don't know how to anyway). But I have a desktop machine from which I can copy my applications.

The only snag is that there won't be enough space on the 256GB SSD of my new Mac to accommodate all the applications on my iMac, due to having a large number of games installed, so I'll have find a workaround. I'll try temporarily storing the .app bundles in cloud storage (and then disconnecting it) to fool Migration Assistant into ignoring them and their support files.

 

[MacUser2525]

Get an SSD, an external enclosure and put the games or any other files not immediately needed on there. It will allow quick access and depending on the files needed once loaded you could almost run them from the drive. If it only needs to load the game it may be able to do it into the memory and not have to access the external often for other files.

 

[Brian33]

I still get the boot screen with a black background

Is it a black background with a bunch of scrolling messages during boot-up? This likely indicates that the machine is booting in "verbose" mode, which I remember is one of the recommended changes in the process of getting an old 2011 Macbook Pro working with dosdude1's patches.

You can verify this is the case by using this Terminal command:
nvram -p | grep boot-args

if boot-args is "-v" it boots in verbose mode. Maybe Migration Assistant migrated the NVRAM variables to you new computer. You can change back to regular boot: I believe you can either set boot-args to "", or just delete that nvram variable. (Type "man nvram" for details.)

sudo nvram boot-args=""
OR
sudo nvram -d boot-args

I can't think of any reason your 'csrutil enable' isn't working. I doubt it's from the dosdude1 patches, but I can't explain what would be causing it. Maybe some other nvram variable? I'm just guessing. You could reset the nvram on the new machine -- apple has instructions posted. (Note that resetting nvram is different from resetting the SMC.)
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[Oxygeneralist]

Sorry for the long delay in replying.

I did a clean install which fixed the problem. It was a bit of a pain to recreate all my settings but I've become used to that over the years and sometimes starting from scratch can be beneficial. The Mac wasn't booting in verbose mode. I never found out why 'csrutil enable' wasn't working but SIP is now enabled after the clean install. Catalina seems very buggy compared to Mojave, but otherwise everything is working well.

Thanks to all who posted.