I’m back, I’m married, and I’m behind the news cycle. Although being behind the news cycle should be treated as a state of bliss, it’s not a great place to be when you use news articles for blog material. It’s going to take me a day or two to catch up.
One project I did tackle over my extended vacation is getting macOS Mojave installed on my computers. Mojave dropped official support for several Macs but just because Apple doesn’t officially support a platform doesn’t mean it can’t be used. I see no reason to throw away perfectly functional hardware and enjoy receiving security updates. Because of that, I ended up playing with dosdude1’s Mojave Patcher.
The patcher originally didn’t work for me because all of my computers have FileVault enabled and the version I first downloaded had a bug where it couldn’t mount FileVault containers. That was before I left for my wedding. Fortunately, by the time I got back a new version that fixed that bug was released.
I used the patcher to install Mojave on my 2010 Mac mini 4,1 and my 2010 MacBook Pro 5,4. Installation on my Mac mini was smooth. I haven’t had any major problems with it. Installation on my MacBook Pro was another matter. I should note beforehand that the MacBook Pro in question has a bad memory controller. One of the two memory banks has a 50/50 chance of working when I power the system on. If it doesn’t work, I only have access to half of my memory. That may be why I have to reset the NVRAM every time I power the system on in order to get it to boot (if I don’t reset the NVRAM, I get the dreaded no symbol when I start the computer).
If you’ve been happily running an older Mac and found out that Mojave won’t install, try dosdude1’s Mojave Patcher. It doesn’t work on every old Mac (a list of supported Macs can be found at the link) but it does work for most of the 64-bit Intel Macs.