Update from 10.8.5 to 10.11, Chimera to Clover

[adamthecarny]

Hi, I've searched and can't find a definitive answer. I was hoping somebody could help me out.

I have a fully functioning Mountain Lion 10.8.5 installation, which I created using Chimera/Unibeast/Multibeast. I have recently installed some 4TB drives, which 10.8.5 can't format for use, so I've decided it is time to upgrade to El Capitan 10.11.

I want to avoid a fresh re-install because I have a bunch of scripts that I don't have time to try and reinstall and retest.

Can I upgrade this way?:
1) Test and then permanently replace Chimera with Clover using this guide: http://www.tonymacx86.com/basics/171680-clover-basics-switching-advice.html - i.e. will this work with a 10.8.5 installation that hasn't been fiddled with in years?

2) Upgrade from 10.8.5 to 10.11 using software update, with a few tweaks outlined here: http://www.tonymacx86.com/el-capita...rect-update-os-x-el-capitan-using-clover.html i.e. will this work with 10.8.5 or is additional work required?

From what I have read, this should be the easiest and best supported way to get from 10.8.5 to 10.11, but I have only found examples of people going from 10.9 to 10.11, or 10.8.5 to 10.10, and haven't found someone that has followed the steps above to go from 10.8.5 to 10.11.

Alternatively, does anyone have any suggestion for how to get a 4TB drive working in 10.8.5?

Thanks for your time.

 

[IngoS2]

Hi,

I'm actually standing at the same point.

How to upgrade OSX 10.8.5 to 10.11.1 without having to reinstall all applications ?

Thanks for your answer.
Ingo

 

[jlwojcik]

I came here to ask the same question. Has anyone figured this out?

Thanks in advance.

 

[lflier]

I'm ready to attempt this, too.

 

[RobinD42]

I just did it this past weekend. I did run into some troubles for the first few attempts, but I worked it out eventually, and then it was smooth sailing after that. I had (still do) my / on an SSD, and then all of /Users on a separate hard drive, so it was real easy to make multiple attempts. I copied (with Carbon Copy Cloner) the SSD to another spare drive, then disconnected the SSD and the /Users drive. Then I could try doing the upgrade using that spare drive and not mess anything else up if I FUBARed it. If I did then I just plugged the SSD and /Users back in, booted up, and copied the boot drive back to the spare drive again, and then started over.

In the end the thing that was tripping me up was the non-standard or non-apple drivers on the 10.8 boot drive. They were causing the first boot after the installer runs to get stuck. I had tried cleaning them all out by hand by removing them on the spare drive after making the copy and before attempting to do the upgrade, but I guessed I missed some. Finally I just wiped out all of {spare drive}/System/Library/Extensions, and then copied over the SLE folder from a real Mac running 10.8. I also removed {spare drive}/Extra and {spare drive}/boot. After that the upgrade went as expected.

I used Unibeast 6.1.1, selecting the UEFI boot loader, and OSX 10.11.1 to make the bootable USB. Just like the old installs with Chameleon after the installer was done I booted with the USB again but selected the install disk to boot from. I also connected the /Users drive again since it would try to mount it when booting up, and since that is where my account's files are at. When that booted and went through a few upgrade steps for my user account I ran Multibeast 8.0.1 to install the boot loader and FakeSMC. The only additional driver I needed for my motherboard was an Intel ethernet driver. Later on I discovered that I needed to use some of the same kernel boot flags I was using before with Chameleon so I used Clover Configurator to set those in my EFI partition.

Once I was happy with everything I shut down, reattached my SSD drive, booted up from the spare drive again and then CCC'd it back to the SSD drive. I also copied the EFI and Recovery HD partitions.

HTH,
Robin