Comment #811

Then it would not be Zelda and god willing they would hopefully have a cool enough character to replace him.

- Carl on I'm apprehensive about this one.

Tags: Apple, macos, catalina, dosdude1, catalina patcher, late 2011, macbook pro, unsupported macs

There's this guy, dosdude1 who is instrumental in reducing the cost of new macs and bringing new life to older macs.

I have a late 2011 Macbook Pro 15" that has been an incredible machine since I got it. This thing has been to hell and back, in a sense survived floods, dead graphic cards and now had an OS that Apple specifically does not allow on this type of machine is currently running on it.

Basically dosdude1 created a tool that does most of the work for you, it downloads the Catalina installer, will install the installer on a usb key or external hard drive or even install Catalina directly onto your main drive.

Then, there's a tool that's included in the softare that patches the system to add things that were removed during the upgrade so that the older hardware will work again.

This is also the same dude that discovered that you can bypass the dedicated graphic cards in this model machine, which was notorious for kicking the bucket. I've posted previously about the workaround here.

There's one catch to all of this that I honestly have hit a dead end with. My Macbook Pro will not sleep at all. Close the lid and the machine stays on, backlight and all. Tell it to go to sleep and it will but then it doesn't wake up. Let the machines sleep timer kick in and the same thing happens.

I've tried everything I can think of to fix this, scoured the internet for any information I can find but most results come up with a bug in catalina that doesn't really apply to me as far as I can tell. Catalina has an issue with replacement nvme drives - mine can't take an nvme though I have replaced the hdd and dvd with 2 ssd. I think this might be a cause but have no real way to test it.

I have 2 more theories but won't be able to test one of them until I get back to St. Kitts.

1. The gpu work around I'm using - disabling the dedicated AMD Radeon HD 6750M - might have something to do with it. I can't enable the gpu because the bloody thing doesn't work so the machine won't boot with it.
2. Install a fresh copy of catalina and see if that'll fix it. Maybe something in the process of upgrading from Mavericks to Catalina instead of doing a clean install is the culprit. But I don't really have anything to back up onto just yet to try this.

I've thought about downgrading but I need the machine for work right now and despite the no sleeping thing, the machine is purring along like a kitten. It's actually quite surprising how well this thing runs catalina.

I've been able to upgrade all of my apps to their latest versions as well, firefox, office, thunderbird, steam, you name it. Just a pity I can't really play anything intensive with my integrated card...

I might go pick up a 1tb hard drive, there's a place selling them here for 30euros so I figure why not. If I do, I'll try backing up etc and doing a fresh install and see if that helps. I could also wipe the 2nd ssd I have but would nee to copy things over.

I'll post more as I figure things out.