If anyone knows of a good combination of DosDude1 and/or OCLP 0.43 (or earlier) patches that work on the 2009-2011 era "silverback" iMacs and Minis (where hardware-acceleration, wifi, and or color-accuracy are usually fubared), please post of it. (I'm especially interested in anything set-up robust enough to work with all of the models (i.e., such that a single external boot drive will correctly launch on any 2008-2011 machine as well as the 2012-2019 ones).
This a work-in-progress that I call MacOS Mojo (for Mojave-Optimized), and am close to the Grail of a single OS that will boot (externally) any C2D or i-series chip Mac of mid-2019 or earlier. This post concerns the "unsupported" Mac portion of that project. I thought about making a new thread (given that this one is nearing 800 pages and 20,000 posts), but will post here for now.
Prefatory note: I will not provide a list of software sources; a minimal level of prowess is required here, and the ability to find things on the internet serves as a handy Litmus test.
**=== Mojave on 2010/11 i-chip iMacs & others ===**
(...where "& others" refers to machines also not on Dosdude1's fully-patched list.)
**Recommended items list:**
1. external USB drive, ideally several. ( I get used SATA SSD mechanisms from a recycler very cheaply, and use them with a spiffy Sabrent SATA-USB csble.)
1a. (optional) Create a Yumi/Ventoy drive on one external with plenty of space (ideally 250gb or bigger). On it, have the latest ISO of RescueZilla. (Note: many flashstick-type USB devicrs are scam-trash with horrible throughput; a SATA SSD is vastly superior to most of them for, especially, external booting.)
2. The following software is required: DosDude1 Mojave patcher, and OpenCore v0.4.3 (and no later) for certain models not fully patched by dd1.
2a. All of the following software (some of which is now hard to find) is very useful: Carbon Copy Cloner 5 (CCC5), GetBackupPro3, Paragon Hard Drive Manager 1.2.241, Himmelbar, MainMenu, MacsFanControl, DriveDx, DiskWarrior5, Find Any File, Momiji and Orion and Chromium-Legacy browsers), and one of Peggle Nights or Angry Birds Seasons or any other OpenGL 32bit game.
2b. A wired keyboard and wired two-button wheel-mouse will save a fair bit of time not having to deal with bluetooth connection headaches or necessity of ctrl-key clicking.
3. (if necessary) Access to a second intel Mac, to marshal the items above and to create the resources below. (Note: the Dosdude1 patcher can be created with, but will not successfully boot on, most 2014+ Retina machines.)
**Procedure**
0. On your prep Mac, go to (menubar) Finder > Preferences and check the box to show hard-drives, then right-click the desktop and sort icons by Kind. In System Preferences > General, set scrollbars to Always.
00. (Aggravation avoidance) Launch Terminal, and input *sudo spctl --master-disable* and enter user password. Then in System Preferences > Users & Groups, change password to nothing. Then in System Preferences > Security & Privacy, click the lock (and don't type anything for a password), then uncheck rhe Require password box. (Allow apps downloaded From: section should show "Anywhere" with a dotted circle. --Yay! You can now use your Mac without having to type a password every five seconds, or be constantly thwarted by the App Store gatekeeper. (You are going to get asked for a user password a LOT doing all these steps.)
000. If you're attempting to
backgrade to Mojave from a higher OS version, you may find yourself unable to boot from an external device until a firmware password has been removed. Boot into Recovery Mode, go to Utilities > Startup Security Utility, enter the password then disable any drive security as well as enable external booting. (You may have to restart a few times, as well as disable SIP...see below.)
1. Prepare a DosDude1 Mojave patcher: The dd1 patcher (like many installers) will wipe an entire external drive, but actually uses very little space. After creating it, launch (Applications > Utilities) Disk Utility and create a new 9gb size MacOS Extended-journaled partition at the end of the device. (The icons for these drive partitions will both appear on the desktop.)
1a. Launch CCC5, create a new cloning session (if none exist), drag the dd1 patcher partition icon into Source and the 9gb one into Destination. Under Source, set to Copy Some Files, and uncheck everything but the System Folder. Under Destination, set SafetyNet to Off. Then start the clone; as it finishes, CCC5 will ask if you wish to create a Recovery Partition; let it. Now under Source, set to Copy All Files, and do a second clone pass. (Congrats: the majority of that external drive is now freed up, and the small 9gb dd1 installer is easy to archive or clone elsewhere -- such as at the back end of the 500gb or 1tb internal drives in most iMacs.
1b. If your prep machine balks at performing any of these steps, you probably need to disable SIP.
1c. I find it useful to also have an El Capitan boot partition, also with respective Recovery Partition, on the same external drive. (This will permit us to easily launch an ElCap Recovery Partition on the target machine to disable SIP in Terminal and do a preliminary drive erase in Disk Utility (see step 4 below) on Mojave-unsupported machines; ElCap's version of Disk Utility is capable of brute-force erasing some drives that stymie newer versions.
1d. Do NOT set drive-encryption or case-sensitivity, and do NOT create a security password in Recovery Partition! --Save yourself a world of future hurt.
2. (Now on the target "unsupported" machine now, with the external drive connected....) Zap PRAM once, then disable SIP (see step 4, using any OS version Recovery Partition).
2a. Reboot into any viable OS on the target machine. Run DriveDx to determine the SMART (health) status of the internal drive(s). Any with a "red" color indication are nearly dead. (I generally advise against replacing drives in iMacs; it's much easier and less risky to attach a newer, faster external.) Drives in "red" will sometimes "heal" to "yellow" with a one-pass write of 0s erase in Disk Utility...or croak for good. "Yellow"-listed rotational drives are usually still good for many more years of moderate home use provided the APFS file-system is kept off them and machine ram increased to 8gb to eliminate most drive-caching.
2b. After disabling SIP and measuring the internal drive, reboot into the dd1 Mojave installer and open Disk Utility; erase the internal or target drive *again* to MacOS Extended-journaled, then partition it into three equalish pieces. Then erase the second one as APFS, then install Mojave into that APFS partition.
2c. During installation, decline virtually everything that is optional at that point: location services, wifi, Apple diagnostics, Siri, etc. Name the user account Admin
2d. When finished, run the post-installation patches over the same partition. (The Mac might reboot after installation -- and fail to launch since Mojave isn't patched yet -- requiring you to manually reboot into the dd1 installer.) Important: in the patcher option list, check the box for Recovery Partition, and select the disk(x)s(y) 650mb partition following the 9gb one at the end of the external installer drive. (Rerun additional times as needed for other applicable Mojave recovery partitions on the target machine. This step may have to be redone after cloning.)
3. Restart into Mojave. About this Mac > System Update ...install the 005 and Safari updates (which will take their jolly sweet time). Do NOT install any listed newer version of the OS! After it reboots, check Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor's memory tab to verify that ram usage is not excessive (~2.2gb on 8gb machine, ~1.7 on 4). Install CCC5, GBP3, and the other utilities now. Clone the installation, even if still imperfect, to the third drive partition. Reboot into it to verify it works, then reboot back to the original, and clone a second time to the first drive partition. (If the clones use excessive memory according to Activity Monitor, run a second clone pass with GBP3, then a third with CCC5 again.)
On many Macs, you're mostly done at this point (skip to step 4, then 7) if the color palette looks correct and wifi works, and you can skip-read the rest. (Launch either of the games cited above to quickly verify if hardware-acceleration is wotking.) On a 2010 or 2011 iMac, colors will be wrong and/or hardware-acceleration disabled.
4. Reboot into Recovery Partition 10.14.6, and launch Terminal from the menubar. Input *csrutil disable* and hit Enter, then reboot into the first target drive partition (the MacOS Extended-journaled clone made above).
5. Launch OpenCore 0.4.3, and let it build, then install (note that the "build" button changed after clicking it) a boot EFI for your machine on the target drive. (It may require you reboot at this point.) The OpenCore EFI now becomes the default first-booted item on the machine, which then displays the usual option-key bootloader list (except with better icons) for a few seconds before launching the default OS partition (which will be the one used to install it); defaults for either can be reset using the usual (Option/Alt) and Ctrl key tricks.
5a: Paragon Hard Drive Manager 1.2.241 is occasionally used for two reasons: a) cloning 200mb EFI boot partitions (either OpenCore or "unmolested"), and b) cloning pre-migrate partitions whose clones made by CCC5 and/or GBP3 show wild ram consumption in Activiry Monitor. (Otherwise, do not overuse this application, as it does not respect the 134.22mb free-space segments left between HFS+ drive partitions created in Disk Utility, which will report errors during drive Repair scans if they're missing.)
6. On a 2010 or 2011 iMac (and perhaps certain others), you'll need to rerun the opencore 0.4.3 application and run the root-patch function *after* checking the box for 10.14/15 hardware-acceleration. (Note: running the dd1 patches again may bollocks the whole thing, which is why I tend to make backup partition clones every odd step of the way.)
After restarting, you'll have a Mojave 10.14.6 installation on an "unsupported" non-"metal" i-series DVD-model with working wifi, bluetooth, sound, color-palette, dual-mode, and hardware-acceleration and Open GL support.
7. (optional but recommended) Disable all of the following in Terminal (SIP must be disabled, and you'll need to temporarily recreate a user password): MRT, MDS_stores, Reportcrash, Spotlight Indexing (replace with Find Any File), and Software Update (disablement unnecessary if you're not using OCLP).
7a. I also disable Notifications because 99% of them are Apple scare-mongering BS always popping up over the desktop icons I'm trying to click.
7b. After disabling MRT, make a copy of Find Any File, rename it to MRT, and drag it into System > Library > Core Services. Get Info it, and click the Lock box to prevent the OS from ever reactivating default MRT.
7c. Install one or more "modern" browsers, and also adding the uBlockOrigin extension to each. Chromium-Legacy and Momiji are still nominally current, and Orion nearly so. (In any Firefox-fork, examine all preference settings and disable all suggestions and Mozilla telemetry.)
7d. Right-click to remove News, Safari, and any other "Apple ecosystem" launch icons you deem worthless from the dock. In the freed-up room, I usually drag on SimpleText, Calculator, Activity Monitor, CCC5, Disk Utility, and Terminal.
8. To create a pre-Migration "golden-master" archive of the working install, boot RescueZilla (using Grub mode on Macs) from the Yumi/Ventoy drive, and create a backup of the relevant partitions (which will be the 200mb EFI, the first OS partition, its 650mb Recovery Partition, and the 9gb dd1 installer partition if you like). After it's finished and you've restarted, *then* use the Migration Assistant to import your regular Mojave (or earlier) load-out from another machine's drive-clone.
8a. Keep both accounts when Migration Utility asks what to do with the existing Admin account.
8b. Remove no-longer-needed partitions with Disk Utility. Note that APFS partitions may need their individual compartments erased, and then the APFS parent erased to MacOS Extended-journaled (aka HFS+), before that partition can be "minused" (-) in Disk Utility.
8c. Do not use APFS boot-partitions long-term on rotational or Fusion drives (both of which are served very well by HFS+). Do NOT separate Fusion drives unless DriveDx reports one part is failing (note: rotational drives are usually still OK if listed as "yellow"/failing so long as they don't have hundreds of pending bad-block map-outs).
8d. The 3rd-party utility DiskWarrior5 is able to repair most instances of HFS+ partition corruption when Disk Utility is unable to*. It does, however, like to install annoying auto-launch components. (The, err, source of my copy allows running the utility from inside its launch container without having to fully install it. You will still have to remove its launch item from your Users and Groups settings afterwards, otherwise the installer will pop up every restart. (*If an external boot device ever becomes detached, do NOT reattach it! Instead, force power off the computer by holding the button, reattach the device, and then reboot. Otherwise, file-table corruption is likely to occur.)
8e. Examine the two Library > Launch folders for instances of things you don't want constantly running (as seen in Activity Monitor, if not more obviously). Note that many subscription-model application suites, Adobe in particular, will install tons of enervating crap in here. But be careful, as manually removing opencore root-patch components may prevent the machine from booting. (Correcting such F-ups is why is we make multiple partition backups, and consequently why CCC5 is the Mac GOAT utility.)
(Further edits and tweaks forthcoming....)
Deployment example:
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...sx-mojave-today.2322173/page-12#post-34421528
Addendum: I have discovered that, once set up on a 2010 or 2011 iMac, the resulting install, if CCC5-cloned to another unsupported machine, no longer needs the opencore utility (or EFI bootloader). This is the ideal situation for clone deployment to large numbers of recycler-obtained machines otherwise bound for scrap.
