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“Valuable Lesson”
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Administrator
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: San Antonio TX USA
Status:
Offline
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Today, I decided to see just what System Updates my upgraded iMac wanted me to install. They seemed benign; security updates for Mojave, an update for Safari…nothing scary.
Except I forgot that I got the machine to load Mojave with a dodge. So it spent hours re-re-restarting, encountering “an error” and looping back to the restart.
I’m going to spend a little time tomorrow recovering my Mojave install. Then I’m going to forget about these “benign” updates until I can find a way to get them to work properly.
So my valuable lesson is that if you’ve “customized” a Mac in some way (in my case, I used a special installer patch that let Mojave ignore the hardware signature of my 2007 iMac) then you must be very attentive when installing anything related to the OS. Oops, my bad, etc.
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Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
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Administrator
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: California
Status:
Offline
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Non-OS updates (like Safari) will be OK.
Updates that don't require a reboot (like malware definitions) will be OK.
For OS-reboot stuff, keep a 2nd Mojave install around. Apply the update to the "other" system install:
While booted from regular Mojave install (internal drive presumably), plug in external with 2nd Mojave install. Apply update to the external drive. Then reboot into Mojave on the external drive.
If everything went OK, while booted into external Mojave, apply the same update to the internal Mojave install. Reboot back to the internal.
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The above procedure solved my issues with updates to unsupported installs.
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Administrator
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: San Antonio TX USA
Status:
Offline
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Unfortunately I think I’m going to have to do a full Mojave installation again. The thing got stuck in a loop and would reboot over and over. Unless it decided to just quit with a big “NO OS” image.
My Time Machine backups? Somehow I never got the Time Machine drive selected for backups…. Oops.
I’ve tried to reinstall from the tweaked Mojave installer, but I get called away for something and suddenly it’s already rebooted and is stuck with a blank white screen. So I’m delving into the instructions for the original Mojave upgrade - if I can find them.
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Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
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Administrator
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: San Antonio TX USA
Status:
Offline
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It looks like all it took was running the Post Install tool (and the Patch Updater) along with a few reboots.
I'm amazed that my user setup was preserved. It's all there, including stuff like my password manager.
I wonder if maybe all I needed to do was the Post Install tool to begin with. Anyway, I'm back up and running on the iMac now.
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Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Jul 2021
Status:
Offline
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Thank you for the heads up!
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: UK
Status:
Offline
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Mojave on a 2007 iMac? Hows does that run? I just picked up a 20" as it happens. Might even be a 2008, haven't looked.
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I have plenty of more important things to do, if only I could bring myself to do them....
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Administrator
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: San Antonio TX USA
Status:
Offline
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First I upgraded both the CPU and the hard drive. I used not quite the fastest chip that would work, but it’s pretty fast. And I took out the stock 300GB hard drive and installed a 500GB SSD (a bit more capacity but a LOT more speed).
Then I used a hack to alter the Mojave installer with tools from dosdude1’s tools. Following the instructions on his site, the install worked well. I got the heads-up about this hack from reader50.
The problem I had was forgetting that some updates do the hardware checks that the install hack evades, but those updates don’t fail gracefully.
So if you go this route, remember a couple of things:
First, a stock 2007 iMac will be slow as molasses with Mojave; the CPU and drive upgrades were crucial to a usable machine.
Second, be cautious about what updated you install, and when in doubt, “if it needs a restart, you’ll need to use the post install tools to un-goober the machine”.
Finally, this is far from a mission critical machine, so if it conks out, I don’t have an urgent problem, just a hassle.
But the effort was definitely worth it to get an old reliable machine back into the game, even if it’s just a convenient desktop web browser box.
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Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
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