macOS 10.15 Catalina on Unsupported Macs

[Minghold]

Best: Like above, but install Mojave instead of Catalina. After the all-updates phase, create another MacOS Extended (journaled) partition on the external drive, the clone the new APFS Mojave partition to it. Boot into it to verify it works, manually migrate your documents, then erase the internal drive as MacOS Extended (journaled), then clone the OS again. Result: a system that runs noticeably faster, and runs much, much more software.

So if I glean this correctly, the best route is to install and fully update Mojave onto an external disk and clone it into HFS+, then clone that again to HFS+ on the internal SSD? That's a workaround to not using APFS at all?

Correct. (And it doesn't matter whether the internal drive is hdd, ssd, or fusion.) Running off HFS+ is one of the major goals of staying with Mojave., as it's the last OS capable of doing so (as well as the last that'll run the preexisting mountain of 32bit software). Catalina was a planned-obsolescence OS deliberately designed to run like garbage on intel Macs, and prompt users into spending thousands upgrading for Apple's subscription-model rubber room future.

 

[marvS]

I used the Catalina patcher to install macOS Catalina on my 15-inch MacBook Pro 2009 and was successful in doing so. The only problem seems to be that the internal SuperDrive is not being recognized. It does not show up in Diskutil, or Finder or in System Information. A reset of SMC or PVRAM does not make it appear. The terminal command DRUTIL does not return anything except for the version command IOKit: 2.0.2 (21474836.47) and DiskRecording: 9.0.3b5.

Anyone know how I can get the drive to be detected? The drive spins up at boot and when a disk is inserted, regardless of that it should still appear in the system information list.

 

[Minghold]

I used the Catalina patcher to install macOS Catalina on my 15-inch MacBook Pro 2009 and was successful in doing so. The only problem seems to be that the internal SuperDrive is not being recognized. It does not show up in Diskutil, or Finder or in System Information. A reset of SMC or PVRAM does not make it appear. The terminal command DRUTIL does not return anything except for the version command IOKit: 2.0.2 (21474836.47) and DiskRecording: 9.0.3b5.

Anyone know how I can get the drive to be detected? The drive spins up at boot and when a disk is inserted, regardless of that it should still appear in the system information list.

Unless there's a feature Catalina has and Mojave does not that you can't live without out, you're much better off running a Mojave/HFS+ setup on that 2009. It'll be much faster, and run 32bit apps.. (If hardware-acceleration will not enable on the incapable machine, then backgrade further to High Sierra, and install Chromium-legacy as a modern browser.)