[Guide] Install High Sierra or Mojave on the Dell Optiplex 7010 / 9010 Desktop PC - Revision II

[waipeinan]

Hello all...
this lovely vintage MT build seems to need some fresh love and housework.... so I shall try and find the time to read through this major thread and head to open core perhaps.

Meanwhile I no longer seem to have usb3 working I'm sure I did).. can anyone point me to the right guide to troubleshoot and hopefully fix this fresh issue (I ask for homework help as super dyslexia make cogent thread following extra difficult).

thanks in advance
wpn

 

[ohgood]

I'm attempting my first install on the 7010 with a gt710 graphics card...

after booting from the Catalina USB stick I'm getting "firmware update required" and have lost use of the mouse and keyboard.

I've googled around, and understand it may have something to do with booting from USB , apfs, clover, or a few other things.

had anyone nailed down how to get around this error ?

I'm coming from high Sierra

 

[ohgood]

I've wasted an entire day trying to apply these tutorials to this 7010... every step of the way is a failure.

the USB stick from beast won't boot, so I tried patcher, nope it won't boot either, tried a CD burn, nope, failed, tried copying to a hard drive, nope, won't boot.

what's so special about the installers in Mac that they just will not boot ?

I can burn a Linux live CD in five minutes, dd a Linux thumb drive, but with Mac is installers it's so broken I don't know where to start anymore.

step by step guides end up with hours wasted waiting for another install image to download...

what am I doing wrong ?

 

[UtterDisbelief]

I'm attempting my first install on the 7010 with a gt710 graphics card...

after booting from the Catalina USB stick I'm getting "firmware update required" and have lost use of the mouse and keyboard.

I've googled around, and understand it may have something to do with booting from USB , apfs, clover, or a few other things.

had anyone nailed down how to get around this error ?

I'm coming from high Sierra

You get this issue if the partition and format of the destination disk is not as the installer requires. Often APFS is needed for later macOS versions whereas we have always recommended HFS+ previously.

I encountered exactly this problem at the weekend.

I had to delete all partitions on the destination and then repartition/format etc. Once done the Installer accepted it. This is rather annoying as you used to be able to install over a previous installation and it would upgrade without removing any apps or data already there.

If you have vital data on the destination remember to back-up everything you can first.

 

[ohgood]

You get this issue if the partition and format of the destination disk is not as the installer requires. Often APFS is needed for later macOS versions whereas we have always recommended HFS+ previously.

I encountered exactly this problem at the weekend.

I had to delete all partitions on the destination and then repartition/format etc. Once done the Installer accepted it. This is rather annoying as you used to be able to install over a previous installation and it would upgrade without removing any apps or data already there.

If you have vital data on the destination remember to back-up everything you can first.

i'm starting with a spare hdd. i've updated bios, partitioned a 80Gb spinner to APFS, and attempted to install both via official apple usb installer, downloaded installer, and dosdudes usb installer. after the first reboot, the 80Gb drive is not showing in my clover (my main drive with high sierra has clover) list of bootable drives. i've booted HS to verify, that the 80gb drive is not listed as "bootable" in disk utility.

i'm not sure why the installer media (usb/installer/etc) is not making the 80Gb APFS drive bootable at this point. I am going to attempt to carbon copy cloner my main 1Tb high sierra drive (HFS) to the 80Gb test drive (apfs) and then attempt upgrading from there... I don't have any other ideas about making the 80 Gb drive bootable at this point.

 

[UtterDisbelief]

i'm starting with a spare hdd. i've updated bios, partitioned a 80Gb spinner to APFS, and attempted to install both via official apple usb installer, downloaded installer, and dosdudes usb installer. after the first reboot, the 80Gb drive is not showing in my clover (my main drive with high sierra has clover) list of bootable drives. i've booted HS to verify, that the 80gb drive is not listed as "bootable" in disk utility.

i'm not sure why the installer media (usb/installer/etc) is not making the 80Gb APFS drive bootable at this point. I am going to attempt to carbon copy cloner my main 1Tb high sierra drive (HFS) to the 80Gb test drive (apfs) and then attempt upgrading from there... I don't have any other ideas about making the 80 Gb drive bootable at this point.

I'm sorry I've never used "DosDude" software so can't offer guidance there. If you are using Windows to create your installer or destination drive I would follow @Feartech 's excellent guide here. Apologies if I've missed the point here.

With an APFS format drive the partition scheme should be GUID.

With this there is a hidden EFI partition of approx. 200MB in size placed on the disk before the main data area. We find the disk allocation for the whole drive by running Disk Utility. Once we have the label - for example it might be disk1s2 - we know the EFI partition will be at disk1s1 and we can view this using EFI Mounter v3.1 (from our Downloads section.) and selecting it. Then we copy our newly created EFI folder into this to make the drive independently bootable.

 

[ohgood]

I'm sorry I've never used "DosDude" software so can't offer guidance there. If you are using Windows to create your installer or destination drive I would follow @Feartech 's excellent guide here. Apologies if I've missed the point here.

With an APFS format drive the partition scheme should be GUID.

With this there is a hidden EFI partition of approx. 200MB in size placed on the disk before the main data area. We find the disk allocation for the whole drive by running Disk Utility. Once we have the label - for example it might be disk1s2 - we know the EFI partition will be at disk1s1 and we can view this using EFI Mounter v3.1 (from our Downloads section.) and selecting it. Then we copy our newly created EFI folder into this to make the drive independently bootable.

aha, i missed the step of copying over EFI folder ... it's booting fine , thank you !

now to get accleration working on my nice old gt710 nvidia card and sound working

this is so much fun when it works a little

 

[rhhousehold]

Looks like we might have opted in to 10.4.6 18G9323 Security Update unintentionally, and 7010 w/NVME won't boot. Errors are

IONvmeController: HandleCompletionErrors( ... )
disk2s1 device error

And gets stuck in a boot cycle repeating this infinitely.

Has anyone else seen issues with this?

I did mount the NVME disk and Disk Utility First Aid found no issues at all with the content. I don't think there is a hardware issue.

@trs96 any ideas?

 

[rhhousehold]

Looks like we might have opted in to 10.4.6 18G9323 Security Update unintentionally, and 7010 w/NVME won't boot. Errors are

IONvmeController: HandleCompletionErrors( ... )
disk2s1 device error

And gets stuck in a boot cycle repeating this infinitely.

Has anyone else seen issues with this?

I did mount the NVME disk and Disk Utility First Aid found no issues at all with the content. I don't think there is a hardware issue.

@trs96 any ideas?

Update on this - it looks like the NVME drive has a hardware problem of some kind. After making a full clone backup of the non-booting NVME drive, I tried restoring/cloning a known, good backup to it and booting and it would not boot all the way up (black screen). (The known backup is on a mechanical HD worked perfectly fine.)

So I purchased a new SSD and cloned the original NVME backup to the new SSD, and it booted up perfectly fine.

It's interesting that cloning the failing NVME was successful, and Disk Utility reported no errors, but it cannot/would not boot past a certain point. Maybe there is some kind of TRIM command(s) that reported errors to Mojave (?).

I'll probably pull the NVME w/PCI card and debug it some more. HP EX 920 500 GB, who knows maybe a warranty claim is in order. And maybe build a new 9020 Monterey w/ OpenCore as a replacement system...

TLDR; do frequent backups, have a spare bootable working copy somewhere of your system.

 

[waipeinan]

I find myself needing to run Soundtrack Pro and want to make a Sierra install for this machine... does anyone have experience of this or tips to adapt the more recent procedure and setups?

ta