macOS Catalina has precise requirements, you will need to have the previous OS version, and it works only on specific MacBooks, iMacs and so on. But even if it might not seem possible to install Catalina on your Mac due to the requirements, you shouldn’t worry that much. There are some methods you can use to install Catalina on your unsupported device. It does require a bit of thinking outside the box, but it’s going to be worth it, and it will be quite the experience.
- Download Mojave On Unsupported Mac
- Download Macos Catalina On Unsupported Mac
- Install Catalina On Unsupported Mac
What do you need?
To install Catalina on your Mac, you will need to download and create a bootable USB installation drive. The drive needs to have 16GB, and it has to be formatted in the Mac OS Extended format. You also need to create a backup for your Mac’s information, to be safe.
How to Install Hackintosh Catalina on PC. Download Catalina. Make Bootable Catalina USB. The video below demonstrates a tutorial walking through the process of using the DosDude Catalina patcher tool to install the macOS 10.15 system software on an unsupported Mac. If you’re going to attempt to install MacOS Catalina on an unsupported Mac, do so at your own risk, and let us know how it goes in the comments below. Download Mac OS X El Capitan DMG File – (Direct Links) Ibrahimi macOS. Download macOS Catalina DMG File – (Direct Links) Ibrahimi macOS. How to Install macOS Catalina on Unsupported Mac. Download macOS Sierra DMG File – (Direct Links) Ibrahimi Windows. How to Delete User Profile Correctly in Windows 10.
With the patcher tool method listed below, you can install Catalina on the Early-2008 or newer Xserve, Early-2009 or newer Mac Mini, Late-2008 or newer MacBook Air or unibody unit or any Mac Pro, MacBook Pro or iMac after 2008.
Keep in mind that Catalina works only on 2015+ MacBooks, 2012+ Macbook Air and Pro models, the 2017 iMac Pro, late 2013 Mac Pro or Newer and the Late 2012 Mac Mini or Newer. So yes, you can install this on much older systems if you use the patcher.
macOS Catalina is fully 64bit, and as such, you should check both your CPU and EFI firmware before installing.
How can you create the Patched macOS Catalina installer?
- Download the latest macOS Catalina patcher
- Run the app; now you will have to download a copy. You need that because you are creating a bootable USB drive installer here.
- Since the installer is around 8 GB in total, you need to wait until the download is complete.
- After the download is done, you will be able to choose the installation method. Insert the USB drive and then choose to Create a Bootable Installer.
- Insert the flash drive in the unsupported Mac. Turn the Mac on and hold the Option key down as it loads up. As you enter the Startup Manager, you will need to select the USB drive and then press Return.
- Now you are in the Recovery environment here. Format the internal drive to APFS; you can use the disk utility for that. That’s very important, and you have to do it especially if the drive is not APFS formatted.
- Choose to Reinstall the macOS option in order to begin the installation process. Wait until it’s done. If there are any command-line manages, those are a normal part of the process.
- After the installation is done, you need to reboot using the USB drive once again. You do that so you can apply the post-installation patches. Those are mandatory if you want to ensure Catalina works properly.
- You can perform the post-installation tasks by choosing the macOS Post Install. Use the Force Cache Rebuild option after the installation is completed. Then you can restart and use Catalina on your old Mac.
As you can see, installing macOS Catalina on old Mac is indeed possible, and it can offer an excellent experience. All you have to do is to follow the guidelines above, and the experience can be great. At the end of the day, forcing Catalina installations on an older Mac is possible, even if it seems impossible at first. You just need to stick to the guidelines!
Subscribe to our News
Want to stay ahead of what's happening in the ever-changing world of digital business solutions?
Our team is made up of talented individuals and as a company we love digital tech, so if you have a passion for keeping up to date with the latest tech/design/development trends, subscribe to the best of our latest news monthly email.
Our team is made up of talented individuals and as a company we love digital tech, so if you have a passion for keeping up to date with the latest tech/design/development trends, subscribe to the best of our latest news monthly email.
Two Birds With One Stone
So I have this old secondhand MacBook Pro 7, 1 that won’t run MacOS later than 10.13.x. I have some uses for the Mac side, namely in the name of mobility, but would also love to get an install of Kali Linux installed so I can play around with it. I saw a comment on Reddit referencing a tool named “Patcher” that would allow for newer versions of MacOS on older Mac hardware. I immediately went down the rabbit hole and here we are.
Outlined below are the steps I took to get Catalina installed, a custom boot manager installed, and Kali Linux running in a dual boot setup. There are 3 main segments to this:
- Create a bootable Catalina USB installer using Patcher then installing Catalina on my unsupported machine.
- Install a custom boot loader onto my machine.
- Copy a Kali Linux iso to a USB drive, then install it onto my machine.
Patcher – Run Newer MacOS on Unsupported Hardware
Prerequisites – Here’s all you need to get started with Patcher:
- Patcher for Catalina: http://dosdude1.com/catalina/
- An unsupported Mac with a hard drive we can wipe.
- A USB thumb drive larger than 10Gb
Getting this going is super easy as the Patcher app does just about everything for you. USB installer creation can be performed on any machine. Once Patcher was downloaded I performed the following steps:
- Open the Patcher DMG and run macOS Catalina Patcher.app.
- Click Continue until you are prompted to either browse for a copy of Apple’s Catalina installer or download a fresh copy. It is imported to note that at the time of this writing 10.15.4 has been released but Patcher and 10.15.4 isn’t working on most machines. Therefore you should use Patcher’s “Download a Copy” feature to grab a copy of 10.15.3, which works.
- Insert your USB.
- Once Catalina is downloaded click the orange external drive icon to “Create a Bootable Installer”.
- Select your USB drive, then click start.
- Enter your password when prompted to begin.
- Once done your USB drive is ready to rock.
- Plug the USB into your unsupported Mac, hold option to bring up the boot picker, and select the Patcher USB.
- Once booted you’ll be presented with a list of options. Highlight Disk Utility and then click continue.
- We need to leave some space for Kali. Above the left pane click View–>Show All Devices.
- Highlight the internal HDD and then click the partition button.
- Create 2 partitions, an APFS partition for our Catalina install and another for Kali. It is up to you to decide how large you wish these to be. I set the Kali partition to be HFS nut this shouldn’t matter since it will be reformatted when we install Kali.
- Close Disk Utility, highlight reinstall macOS, click Continue, agree to terms, select your newly created APFS volume, then click install.
- Once done reboot back into the Patcher USB.
- Click macOS Post Install
- Leave checkboxes alone and click to install patches.
- Allow system to reboot, then boot back into the Patcher USB.
- While were at it, let’s disable SIP. We’ll need to do this in order to install Kali. Click Utilities on the upper toolbar then disable SIP with the following command:
- Reboot and setup Catalina for your use.
Installing rEFInd – Custom Bootloader
Prerequisites – Here’s all you need to get rEFInd onto your machine:
- Your Mac
- The latest version of rEFInd: https://sourceforge.net/projects/refind/
Despite involving some terminal commands this is really quite simple. We’ll mount the EFI volume on the Mac then throw the rEFInd files onto it. It involves a few terminal command but again, quite simple.
- Verify your architecture with the following command:
- You should get something similar to the following:
This indicates 64bit. - Run the following command to verify where the EFI partition lives:
- Take note of the identifier as indicated in the below screenshot:
- Run the following commands to create a directory with which we can mount the EFI volume to, mount it, and create a directory for rEFInd. EFI should be at disk0s1 but if it is different for you then modify the command below appropriately.
- Download rEFInd and unzip it.
- Copy the contents of the refind subdirectory to the refind directory we created in the above command.
- More than likely you are running 64bit EFI. Delete the following to avoid conflicts:
- Delete the following drivers, also to avoid both conflicts and slow boot times:
- Rename refind.conf-sample to refind.conf.
- Now we must bless all things holy in order to boot to our new loader:
- Reboot the machine and you should be presented with the rEFInd bootloader, which should look like this:
Kali Linux – Installation Time
Now that we have our machine prepped we can create a Kali USB installer, boot to it, and install Kali onto our Mac. This part is pretty simple too but you need to be careful when formatting an installation partition, lest you nuke your macOS install. Here’s what you need:
- Your Mac
- Kali iso: https://www.kali.org/downloads/
- A USB thumb drive large enough to house the Kali iso
- Etcher : https://www.balena.io/etcher/
Download Mojave On Unsupported Mac
Here’s what I did:
- Open Etcher.
- Select the iso you downloaded, select your USB drive, click “Flash”.
- Plug your Kali USB into your destination Mac and boot it.
- Your USB should show up as:
Boot Legacy OS from whole disk volume - Once booted select “Graphical Install” and proceed with setting up machine name, username, etc.
- When prompted to manage disks/partitions choose “Manual”.
- Select the HFS volume you created earlier and delete the partition.
- This will now show up as free space.
- Go back to Guided Partitioning and select “use the largest continuous free space”.
- Select your desired partitioning schema. I just used the whole partition for all files, nothing fancy.
- Elect to write the changes to disk.
- Kali will now install, I am not sure if Grub is required but I installed it on my HDD when prompted.
- …
- Profit.
Download Macos Catalina On Unsupported Mac
I imagine you could do this with any Linux flavor, not just Kali. I haven’t attempted to play around with Debian or CentOS or anything but I see no reason why it wouldn’t work for any other Linux distributions.
Install Catalina On Unsupported Mac
I’m just a normal sysadmin type guy who likes cybersecurity a lot.