I still have my Early 2009 MacBook for my kids. It runs El Capitan and Windows 10 (bootcamp). Installation of macOS Catalina on my macbook 5,2 is unsupported. With the Catalina patcher from DosDude1 the installer can be tricked to allow installation.

Keep in mind that the software will be patched and the hardware remains the same. Catalina has features (continuity, handoff) that rely on certain hardware and will not be available. For Catalina to work I’ll need to patch the BootROM to enable booting from an APFS formatted disk – do this first!

After 2 hours my old MacBook showed the apple logo on a grey background. The progress bar hadn’t moved for some time, so I rebooted the machine. Turns out this is a bug reported on github (see references) and rebooting is the workaround 😉 I was greeted with the wizard to configure macOS Catalina and login to my iCloud.

The custom intel SSD supports TRIM. I enabled the TRIM support by running the following command and confirming the change:

sudo trimforce enabled

I noticed that the reboot took a long time. Also the next boot was slow. I booted from the Catalina patcher USB stick and applied the patches manually. Just before the reboot I enabled the checkbox Force Cache Rebuild.

Boot times are back to normal. I’ve only installed Daisydisk and Microsoft Team and both work fine.

Maybe upgrading the memory next time …

References

• macOS Catalina Patcher – to upgrade unsupported macs
• Catalina install hangs at the very end of install (grey background)