Bruhhh
Hello Casey, What about for updating from Catalina to Big Sur when it will be released? Will you update your main Hackintosh to Big Sur when its out? Fortunately anyone running Catalina with OpenCore 0.6.2 or newer is ready for the upgrade. Will create a mini-guide for this soon.
www.tonymacx86.com
You know, this migration is quite important for me because I have been using this Designare system I built because of CaseySJ success and great instructions as my main workhorse. I am an old man and booting processes were always somewhat esoteric for me. I am so old that I actually had an octal listing that I needed to key in actual 1s and 0s in the front panel of an HP computer of the initial code in core memory to boot the machine by copying the first sector of the hard drive in the early 80s ... And indeed in the MBR days it was quite a finicky process, with LILO and GRUB making their magic ... Windows XP looking for the right spot in the disk and all that complicated stuff.
a) EFI stuff is SO MUCH SIMPLER ... Make sure you have an msdos partition on your disk that holds the EFI filesystem - usually occupies 200MB or so - negligible space these days - and the motherboard firmware will do the job for you by loading in memory the contents of <EFI_PARTITION>\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.efi (using backslash instead of forward / to be consistent with MS-DOS naming, but in UNIX (Macs, Linux, Solaris, etc) it is / ... A smart bootloader like Clover or OpenCore should be able to allow you to boot macOS, Linux, Solaris, Windows, etc.
b) The second piece of the puzzle that was made so much simpler by the work of CaseySJ and others in this thread was getting rid of all the hackintosh magic in the actual APFS partition that runs macOS. No more kexts in /System/Library/Extensions and all over the place that made each upgrade a nightmare of untold proportions. All the tricks needed to fool macOS are done in the EFI stage, and after the Darwin kernel is booted, the EFI partition becomes irrelevant - in fact you can safely remove it if was sitting in a USB drive.
c) Smart people keep their personal files in a separate partition. I have those in fact in a separate RAID of two hard drives since I first booted 10.5 lion (actually did a disk upgrade when got to Sierra)
Now that people understand these simple facts there is a very simple and logical migration path:
i) Make an installer USB with the latest OpenCore and Big Sur. The OpenCore part is a little bit tricky because you want to keep your serial number and other things you had in your config.plist in Clover and any customizations you've done for your EFI when you installed Catalina or Mojave, etc.. - but if you follow the excellent link above you should be able to make it right.
ii) <different thing I suggest> Boot from the USB and instead of choosing the Big Sur Installer, choose your regular Catalina partition. You should have everything working normally as if nothing changed in your machine. If there is a problem of any kind, fix the USB files because I can guarantee you the problem is not in the Catalina partition as we established in (b). I intend to keep it going for a few days in fact because I don't like unpleasant surprises. If it is all good, I will simply mount the EFI in the SSD and copy the USB's EFI into the SSD's EFI. It is as simple as mounting both, cleaning the old Clover EFI directory or moving away, and doing a copy, and test that as well with Catalina.
iii) Use the CCC or whatever for Cloning your Catalina APFS partition and EFI to an external drive in case things go ugly with Big Sur. They won't but one never knows. If you have plenty of space on your SSD you might install Big Sur in a different partition, but that doesn't come for free, you need to later migrate your files to the Big Sur APFS partition. If you do an inplace upgrade, don't need to deal with that. Specially Microsoft Office can be a bit finicky about that kind of transfers ...
*** As a side comment here, I never understood what kind of magic does CCC does. If someone knows it, can you please explain to me what is so special about it that cannot be achieved with a simple rsync followed by running the EFI copier that we had to hack anyway? I hate esoteric things ... *****
iv) Go back and boot the Big Sur installer, install it, and if you haven't done so in step (ii) make sure you copy the EFI from the USB to your SSD EFI partition. And you're done
Can anyone please comment on this? I know it is long, but injects a bit of sanity and basic understanding of what's going on behind the scenes of those instructions in the link above. If I made a mistake, please correct me, I will be really glad.