Category: Technology

As part of my new Hacintosh build (this is the 4th in a series of posts about it), I wanted to move the two internal hard drives from the old computer to the new. In the old computer, I had the internal system drive and two additional internal drives – a 1Tb drive for TimeMachine and a 2 Tb drive for Music, Pictures, and Movies.

I could have just pulled the drives from the old computer and plugged them into the new computer and been done. But with HDD hardware, it’s not a question of if they will fail but when and 6 years into their life they are obviously more prone to failure than they were when they were new. Also, I wanted to increase the sizes. Now 6 years later, disk space is cheap and resources get consumed so I wanted to increase the size of the drives in the new computer but still function with the same layout. So in addition to my system drive in the new computer, I would also end up with two 6 Tb drives taking on the same roles as in the old computer.

And therefore this long post is all about how I did eventually succeed in getting the drives migrated. It was way more complicated than it should have been. I should not have been surprised since my problem with Apple is that while things work well within their tidy little world, but as soon as you go beyond the mainstream, you find lots of problems and this is certainly one of those cases. If you want to skip the failed attempts, jump right to Attempt 9 where I describe the attempt that did succeed. But for the sake of anyone trying other things, I’ll describe where those other problems hit me and could you too. Note that I’m no expert on the subject of hard drive migration but given that it took a few days to work through all of this, I’ve got a lot more familiarity with this than I did at the start!

As usual, if anything written here causes computer failure or data loss or anything else happens to you as a consequence of what I have written, whether legal, physical, or emotional, it’s all on you. And if things like creating partitions, typing in terminal, or making changes in the BIOS are tasks with which you are unfamiliar or uncomfortable, now is a good time to click the “Back” button in your browser and go somewhere else. But thanks for visiting.

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With the question of hardware sorted out and all the parts ordered and installed, I was ready to proceed to the installation. This post will describe the steps to do the installation. This post is the 3rd in a series about this new Hacintosh build.

The full hardware info is in my first post about this new build but for the basics, the target computer is a Dell Optiplex 9020 MT with an i7-4770 processor. The MT and the SFF versions of the 9020 are pretty similar so this should work on either and I imagine most of the processor versions are about the same too. But perhaps an i3 might not work and the USFF version has different ports that wouldn’t work with the files here.

This is my first build with OpenCore and I think in the end, the result is a better running computer – at least so far that seems to be the case. The path to getting this installation working wasn’t entirely smooth but it wasn’t too bad. I wrote about the process of getting to this point in the second post in this series. And that post has all of the references and sources for my build procedure. This post is just the Guide to getting the install done.

This guide describes a dual boot setup with both MacOS Monterey and Windows 10 but if you wanted to, you could skip the Windows 10 part entirely.

As always, many thanks to the Hacintosh community – @morpheousman and @Baio77, in particular, for sharing their setups to get me going.

As usual, if anything written here causes computer failure or data loss or anything else happens to you as a consequence of what I have written, whether legal, physical, or emotional, it’s all on you. And if things like creating partitions, typing in terminal, or making changes in the BIOS are tasks with which you are unfamiliar or uncomfortable, now is a good time to click the “Back” button in your browser and go somewhere else. But thanks for visiting.

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This post is meant mostly for me – to log what happened to get me to the my final install guide. But it might have some info that will be useful to someone else who encounters the same issues. If you are just looking for the steps to do an install, skip right to the install guide post. I describe all the hardware decisions in a prior post about hardware, including why I am working with what is an old computer to start with.

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My last desktop Hacintosh build was back in 2015 and I’ve been using that computer as my main desktop since then. I built it with macOS Yosemite and it has remained at that release ever since. That’s partly because I’m content with the basic OS features not changing but mostly because I didn’t want to break the Hacintosh install. I don’t know that it would have broken with El Capitan but at some point it would have broken. And since it was otherwise working for me, there was no need to change. However in the subsequent 7 years (!), there’s been a lot of change in MacOS and by now I have a lot of Applications that can’t be upgraded and that aren’t working well. Even Firefox hasn’t been able to be updated in ages – I’m running version 78 and the current release is 105 – so web pages often have weird problems displaying or logging in. In short, I’m way past time to upgrade and since the current version is MacOS Monterey, that’s what I’ll be aiming to upgrade to.

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I’ve got two Latitude E5470 computers now running MacOS 12 Monterey. The first is the one that I described in my original post and the second is one that I’ve had for a while after I found a deal on eBay that I had just hadn’t gotten around to setting up. The first computer was updated but the second computer had Monterey installed new with no prior MacOS on the computer.

This is about the time when I start what would turn into a really long post about all the detailed steps to do what I did. But in this case, I pretty much just followed the instructions at OSX Latitude for an E7270. So my post here just will add some additional commentary to that OSX Latitude post.

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Here is a great article from the Atlantic titled The Internet Is Rotting. It describes the problem of link rot and how our new digital archiving is much less resilient and accessible than when we had paper bound books in libraries. And it also does a good job of describing how we got to where we are – how the Internet wasn’t planned to be what it has become.

I’m linking directly to it in that link above and this post will itself be a test of whether an article about link rot will itself be a victim of link rot!

In the spring of 2020, I had gotten a new iPhone SE – the first generation. The second generation SE was already out but the reason I like the original is the size. I got the phone “new” from eBay but it turned out to have been actually refurbished with a few issues and one of those issues just came to a head. The battery swelled up and the battery would discharge really quickly the lower it got. I now have a fully functional iPhone SE but it took a lot more work to get me here than I expected.

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Fortunately, Hacintoshing has gotten easier through the years due to the hard work of a lot of people on tools and procedures. So it only took a few days to get my Dell Latitudes E5470 and E5570 working with MacOS Catalina. But since it was still a bit of a challenge, I wanted to write up my procedure. I’m sure I’ll be doing this again at some point and it may help out others. And with Big Sur around the corner, I may try to do all this again when Big Sur is released.

As usual, I made this harder on myself by wanting to do a triple-boot option with Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04 Focal. Fortunately, again, this process has gotten easier and just works better now than it has before. For the majority of people who won’t be doing a triple-boot scenario, the sections below are labeled with what is in them so you can do only what applies to your install. Although if you won’t be installing MacOS at all, then you should skip this guide since it relies on the Clover bootloader which is unnecessary if you are going to just use Ubuntu and Windows.

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After getting GalliumOS installed on a Chromebook, here’s what I did to install Minecraft on it including transferring the saved “worlds” from a prior Windows computer. And below I have a link to improve performance.

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Student Chromebooks are “Managed” by the schools so they won’t allow “Linux (Beta)” to run on them. That’s a logical policy for Google to restrict it and as I discovered isn’t even something that a school can change if they wanted. But it means that you can’t do things like run Minecraft on a Chromebook that is Managed. That’s too bad since I really don’t want to get extra hardware for the sake of Minecraft.

But I discovered that you can install GalliumOS on a Chromebook to dual boot it and then you can run Minecraft in GalliumOS. This post will cover the set up of the Chromebook to dual boot ChromeOS and GalliumOS. A subsequent post will cover the specific Minecraft install and post-install steps. I did it on a Dell 11 3189 but it should work on most modern Chromebooks. The steps look long but it actually didn’t take too long to do and the process seems pretty solid.

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