A while back, I posted
how I got Mojave running on my Gigabyte-based Hackintosh that is built around a GA-Z77X-UP5 TH motherboard. This build is showing it's age a little bit, but it still serves me well. Since Catalina is past its initial release bugs with 10.15.1, I figured I'd update my Hack via an upgrade installation—which seemed to be working fine for many people.
So, here's what I did for those who want to give something similar a try:
- Update your boot drive backup using your tool of choice (in my case, SuperDuper! works wonderfully).
- Downloaded the latest tonymacx86 version of Clover - v2.4k_r4961-UEFI.
- Launched an auto-upgraded Clover Configurator.
- Mounted my boot drive EFI partition with Clover Configurator.
- Duplicated the CLOVER folder on the EFI volume to ensure I have a backup of my current working configuration.
- Went to my /Library/Extensions folder to find my installed Hackintosh kexts. I then downloaded any available updates to prep them for installation in my Mojave installation.
- AirportBrcmFixup.kext - was 1.1.9; now 2.0.4
- AppleALC.kext - was 1.3.8; now 1.4.3
- FakeSMC.kext - was 6.26-357-gceb835ea.1800 — no update
- Lilu.kext - was 1.3.6, now 1.3.9
- NoVPAJpeg.kext - now deprecated and no longer needed, with functionality available in WhateverGreen as described here. Deleted this kext prior to upgrading the others.
- WhateverGreen.kext - was 1.2.9, now 1.3.4
- Updated all these kexts in the /Library/Extensions folder using Hackintool as described in this excellent tutorial (see Part 7). This is a safe and easy way to install kexts properly! If you delete any kexts, be sure to either do it prior to installing new ones (which includes rebuilding cache automatically) or to manually force a rebuild.
- While I was in Hackintool, I generated a quick information page to have all my custom serial numbers and UUIDs handy -- very useful in the event a clover.config file gets botched!
- Reboot the system and test things to ensure all your new kexts are working properly and you're still logged in to iCloud, etc.
- Install the tonymacx86 package for the latest Clover build. Reboot and confirm the Mojave build still works 100% properly.
- Download the current Catalina installer. I did this by visiting the App Store, which then bounced me into Software Update in system preferences. Once it downloaded, the installer auto-launches. Quit the installer at this point.
- Update your boot drive backup again for extra precaution—for the truly paranoid, do this on a separate backup from the one you updated in Step 1.
- Run the Catalina installer. Things worked very smoothly for me - all reboots automatically went to the correct working partition, etc. Remember - Catalina uses a new boot volume partition scheme that's described in this post. This is one of the reasons why backups are critical!
- After a while and multiple reboots, I was logged back in to my user account on a newly-upgraded installation of Catalina. Nearly everything worked as expected. Here are the little bumps I ran into due to the uniquenesses of my setup:
- I ended up in an iCloud authentication loop - the PrefPane kept asking me to log in, but it never "took." A full reboot of the system fixed the looping issue.
- Once I was fully logged in to iCloud, I couldn't turn on iCloud Photo Library. I got an error about the volume format for my the disk with my Photo Library—which is a bit odd, as the non-boot volume where the library is stored was already in one of the "allowed" formats. Thanks to this post, I rebooted into recovery mode, ran Disk First Aid on the volume storing the library, and then rebooted. After that, I could turn on iCloud Photo Library without problems. NOTE - I also booted Photos and let it spin overnight to upgrade the library, which has about 70K photos and movies in it...no issues with that. Once iCloud Photo Library was turned on successfully, Photos also wanted to "upload" everything again - which I believe, in fact, is doing a (SLOW!!!) consistency check between the iCloud library and my locally-stored library.
- The new separate Music app wasn't showing album art for basically ANY of my albums. That's a pain in the butt. It appears that just letting the app sit and run (don't let the machine go to sleep!) is SLOWLY fixing this problem. You'll see a "Loading artwork..." message at the bottom left of the Music window while this is underway. I have nearly 350GB of music in the library across 4,500+ albums, so this is going to take a while...
- Update any apps with new versions via the Apps Store (Pages, Numbers, Keynote, etc.). Launch all other apps to confirm everything works as expected, force updaters to fire, etc.
All things considered, this upgrade went pretty smoothly. A little bit of Clover and kext housekeeping, run the installer, troubleshoot some things that seem to happen on "real" Macs as well. No panic moments at all!
Hope others find this useful. Happy Hackintoshing!