As many people have been running system-definitions - the model of Apple Mac your Hackintosh is emulating - which will no-longer be supported under Big Sur, if you would like to upgrade when the time comes you will need make some changes to your
config.plist.
I've been happily running system-definition iMac14,2 for many years but this is an old Mac model which will not be supported going forward with Big Sur. So I need to prepare now.
To get this thread started I'll show you what I needed to do. YMMV but I hope what we can all add to this thread will be useful, or at the very least a pointer as to required actions.
1) Open
config.plist in Clover Configurator or OpenCore Configurator.
2) Go to the SMBIOS (Clover) or PlatformInfo / DataHub-Generic-PlatformNVRAM (OpenCore) section.
3) Open TextEdit and copy and paste into a new document your present Serial Number, Board Serial Number and System UUID. Save this safely.
4) Open the pull-down menu next to Model Lookup / Check Coverage buttons and select your new, compatible system-definition. For my
iMac14,2 machine I chose to upgrade to
iMac17,1. (iMac19,* might be a closer match to my hardware but there are other considerations for these two). This will populate all the necessary fields.
** What you do next is your choice and the important thing here is not to change your definition too many times while connected to the Internet or Apple might lock your ID until you contact them, so take care. I'll explain a reason for the two choices later on.
5) You can choose to create a
new Mac as far as Apple is concerned and save all the changes the Configurator has made. You will then be required to re-authorise your iCloud connection with your password when you reboot. This will log a "new" machine against your Apple ID.
OR
You can paste back in the Serial-Number, Board Serial Number and System UUID from the TextEdit document you created earlier. This will restore your "Apple Mac" as far as Apple is concerned, but again you will need to re-authorise iCloud when you reboot.
** Bear in mind if you have
expensive software applications locked to serial-numbers or SUUIDs to activate them, then re-using your old SMBIOS serials might be required. Though this
should work, software developers can be very clever in their activation methods. A good idea would be to do some on-line research just in case you are actually unable to upgrade to Big Sur, or beyond an earlier macOS version, because of these restrictions.
Other issues:
6) POP email accounts will not log-on, asking you to input your passwords for each mail-box again. This will not work. You will need to delete each mail account and set-up as new again. This
will work but re-download all messages left on your servers.
7) Changing serial-numbers like this has the potential to give you a serial that does not match the hardware it is on. Apple encodes some date info in the number. However, this
does work and maybe required for that software activation.
Okay, that's my first post on this subject. Please chime in with your findings, agreements/disagreements, so we can all help each other upgrade successfully to Big Sur.
