Installing macOS Catalina on an unsupported Mac
- Adam
- Feb 19, 2021
- 3 min read
Give your older Mac a new lease of life by using DosDude1's Catalina Patcher to install macOS Catalina.
Before proceeding visit http://dosdude1.com/catalina/ and check the System Compatability section to see if your Mac is supported by the patcher.
In summary, you will be:
Downloading the patcher setup program from DosDude1's website.
Using the patcher setup program you'll create a USB installer.
Use the USB Installer to both install a fresh copy of macOS Catalina and then apply the software patches so Catalina work on your unsupported Mac.
The USB Installer you will be creating is basically an augmented Catalina installer that includes the normal macOS Catalina installer but with an additional step to allow you to apply software patches to your Mac after the Catalina installation.
Here's the process in more detail:
This video explains everything including the criteria for choosing how to format the target disc prior to the actual installation.
Read the instructions and notes on http://dosdude1.com/catalina/ before starting in case you need to take any extra steps.
Not sure it’s essential but I disabled SIP before using DosDude1.
Download the patcher from the DosDude1 website.
Reformat a 16GB USB stick as Mac HFS+ Journaled.
Run the patcher (see the video about going into System settings > Security & Privacy and allowing the patcher to run) and follow the patcher instructions to download Catalina from Apple and install everything onto the USB (takes a while as the download is 8GB that is then being written to a USB stick).
Start up the target machine, with the USB plugged in, and pressing Alt (option) to then select the Catalina volume (on the USB stick) to boot from.
Use Disk Utility to format the target drive in the Mac ready for install (see the video linked above to choose the correct format to select for the drive).
Next install the OS (2nd option down).
Watch the installation which will restart once and then, following the 2nd restart you need to hold down Alt again so you boot back into the Patcher on the USB so you can then select the final option for installing the patches (if you don’t then the Mac will attempt to boot for an unpatched Catalina and may well not boot - in this case restart with Alt held down and go back into the Catalina installer to choose the install patches option).
Once the patches have finished installing select the ‘clear cache’ option and then let it restart.
This then starts up Catalina on your Mac and takes you through the standard macOS Catalina setup process.
Once you get the desktop for the first time, it’ll go to a black screen whilst it sets up the display driver before sending you to the login screen.
Log in using the password you set during the setup process.
Once logged in the Catalina patcher update tool will then prompt you to apply any patcher updates it has found online.
Additional notes:
Some apps (e.g. Chrome) will fail to open the first time after a reboot (and sometimes a few more times after that). If you try and open it, it’ll seemingly do nothing (won’t bounce in the dock) and then shows a crash report after about 30 secs. Then you can open it without issue. This is a known issue and not a great problem.
You can always re-apply the patches by booting from the USB at any time if an OS update overwrites the patches.
Observations after running patched Macs for a while:
You need to run a patcher from DosDude to get video to work in Zoom. See the FAQ section on http://dosdude1.com/catalina/
We've run this successfully on a 2008 21" iMac, 13" 2008 MacBook (Unbody), 13" 2010 MacBook Pro and 15" 2010 MacBoom Pro without any issues
More information:
Videos
Step-by-step guide for using DosDude’s patcher
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