Hello.
I had an old but trusty 2012 MacBook Air lying in a drawer – high spec for its time – and I decided to bring it back to life because a friend of mine needs any kind of computer for work. Of course, the battery was dead, so I replaced it, powered it up, and everything was running fine. But the newest officially supported macOS version was Catalina.
I read online that with OpenCore Legacy you can trick the system a bit and install something newer. I didn’t want to go crazy – just one step up, Big Sur. My mistake was not reading carefully enough: it’s not just a little patch, it’s a deep modification of the core system.
Big Sur installed without any issues, and I was actually impressed – everything worked, smooth graphics, even AirDrop Mac-to-Mac was fine. Unfortunately, after one of the reboots the magic was gone – the loading bar froze halfway, creeping forward a millimeter per minute while the fan spun full speed. After maybe 10 minutes the system finally loaded, but it was extremely slow – 5 seconds to register a keypress, 2 minutes to open Finder. On top of that, something went wrong with power management: the MagSafe LED stopped lighting up, though the charger was delivering power (the battery indicator wasn’t moving).
I’ve spent two days trying to revive it. Resetting SMC, resetting NVRAM, reinstalling OCLP, trying to reinstall Big Sur – nothing worked. I managed to get into Internet Recovery, and after half an hour of waiting I got to Disk Utility and wiped the whole disk, removing all traces of OCLP. Now I’m trying to reinstall Catalina. After about an hour of attempts I finally got it to connect to Wi-Fi during the installer, but the CPU was crunching literally a bit per second, so by the time it connected I’d already hit a timeout. Right now it has moved a bit further, but the estimated install time is 5 hours – and at this rate I doubt it will finish successfully this year…
Is there any way to fix the SMC without going through the whole system installation procedure again?
I had an old but trusty 2012 MacBook Air lying in a drawer – high spec for its time – and I decided to bring it back to life because a friend of mine needs any kind of computer for work. Of course, the battery was dead, so I replaced it, powered it up, and everything was running fine. But the newest officially supported macOS version was Catalina.
I read online that with OpenCore Legacy you can trick the system a bit and install something newer. I didn’t want to go crazy – just one step up, Big Sur. My mistake was not reading carefully enough: it’s not just a little patch, it’s a deep modification of the core system.
Big Sur installed without any issues, and I was actually impressed – everything worked, smooth graphics, even AirDrop Mac-to-Mac was fine. Unfortunately, after one of the reboots the magic was gone – the loading bar froze halfway, creeping forward a millimeter per minute while the fan spun full speed. After maybe 10 minutes the system finally loaded, but it was extremely slow – 5 seconds to register a keypress, 2 minutes to open Finder. On top of that, something went wrong with power management: the MagSafe LED stopped lighting up, though the charger was delivering power (the battery indicator wasn’t moving).
I’ve spent two days trying to revive it. Resetting SMC, resetting NVRAM, reinstalling OCLP, trying to reinstall Big Sur – nothing worked. I managed to get into Internet Recovery, and after half an hour of waiting I got to Disk Utility and wiped the whole disk, removing all traces of OCLP. Now I’m trying to reinstall Catalina. After about an hour of attempts I finally got it to connect to Wi-Fi during the installer, but the CPU was crunching literally a bit per second, so by the time it connected I’d already hit a timeout. Right now it has moved a bit further, but the estimated install time is 5 hours – and at this rate I doubt it will finish successfully this year…
Is there any way to fix the SMC without going through the whole system installation procedure again?
