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.
The first step is to create the USB Flash Drive (UFD) installer. I followed the instructions in the OSX Latitude post to do that. A few things to note:
- Best to start with a newly formatted UFD – and when formatting the UFD, be sure to select the device in Disk Utility, not any existing partition. You will want a GUID (GPT) format for the drive which you can only see when selecting the device. If the devices aren’t visible in Disk Uitlity, use the View menu to change to View All Devices.
- There’s a bunch of things to set when installing Clover on the UFD – those are done through the Customize button in the installer.
- The easiest way to get Monterey is through a direct download from Apple.
- I used the software and bootpack versions included at the end of the OSX Latitude post for my UFD setup. You’ll need an OSX Latitude account to be able to download the files from that post.
- When copying over the ACPI folder, the kexts folder, and the config.plist file, I find it is easier to delete them from the destination first so there’s no confusion about which versions of files end up in the destination folder.
- After the installer UFD was completed, I copied the downloaded stuff that I used to make the installer on to the installer UFD in a folder named “post-install” to save steps later.
For installing on the new computer, did as described in that post’s Step 2 with the following changes:
- I didn’t bother with choosing verbose – I just did the boot up from the Install macOS Monterey as is.
- There were actually a lot of reboots for me and it took a while to get through the process.
After installation, I did as described in Step 3. Some notes from that process:
- I used the post-install folder I had set up earlier on the UFD to do the post install steps here.
- After installing Clover from the package, the EFI partition is automatically mounted so no need to use Clover Configurator at all.
- As when creating the installer UFD, I deleted the original ACPI folder, the kexts folder, and the config.plist file before copying in the new versions.
For this setup, I did the same partition layout as in my original post for the E5470 with the first partition for MacOS, the second for Time Machine, and the third for Windows. (Although my original post also covers doing an Ubuntu partition, I only did that on my E5570 that has the second SSD included, not on either of these two E5470 computers.)
After doing the MacOS Monterey install as above, then I went on to do the Windows install and the steps to make them play nice together as detailed in my original post.
Now, for the upgrade to Monterey for the computer that I had already running Catalina, that proved to be much more difficult. I thought based on the fact that I had the install on the new computer perfected above, I was going to rip through the upgrade without any problem. So I first started by inserting the installer UFD and then doing the new Clover install and copying in all of the EFI partition content. Then I ran the Monterey installer and picked the MacOS Catalina drive. It gave me an error that there wasn’t enough disk space – I needed 3.36Gb more. I had a 100Gb partition with hardly anything but the typical MacOS Monterey install on it. How is that not enough? Clearly, I thought, the Monterey installer isn’t figuring the disk space correctly so I try a different approach.
I rebooted and using the new Clover on the hard drive, selected the UFD to boot from to run the installer. I got the same error about needing more space. I did some math and some research and found that to upgrade from Catalina to Monterey would require around 40 Gb free and I did indeed have around 37 Gb free. A 15 Gb chunk was taken for a Photos Library project that I figured I could just move to another UFD so I got into Terminal and kicked off the copy – it took a really long time. Then I did an “rm” to remove the library making sure that there was no move to Trash involved. I tried installing again and got the same damn error about disk space.
At this point, I started thinking about the wisdom of trying to do the upgrade and fight through this. I.e. whatever weirdness was causing the installer to be wrong about disk available might cause more problems. The new Apple way of doing things is with a partition “group” in APFS and when you look at the total disk used for both partitions, it seems correct but maybe there’s something about how the individual partitions in the group report back to the installer. No idea.
In the end, I decided to wipe out the MacOS partition groups altogether and get it down to free space on the drive. Then I rebuilt the partition and did the install as above. When the install completed, I did a restore from Time Machine (one of the other partitions on the drive and why I have “only” 100Gb available for the MacOS partition. And that seems to be working perfectly well now.
For some reason, one of the computers has an extra Windows partition showing on the Clover bootloader page while the other has an extra MacOS partition showing. I decided to try to tidy things up and remove the extra MacOS partition by using the Clover Configurator to hide the partition based on volume name. That ended up making it so all of the partitions were hidden. I know that there’s an issue with the APFS groups that can cause UUID confusion but I thought this way of doing it would be safe. Nope. I needed to use the UFD installer to fix that and I set up a UEFI boot device on the UFD so I could boot from the UFD’s clover bootloader to fix that. I decided not to bother “fixing” that any further.
I still haven’t figured out the way to really get the E5470 to sleep. Following the OSX Latitude post instructions includes setting hibernatemode to zero which I think disables it but the same instructions indicate that Sleep is working so I think there’s some more work I could do there. But for now, I’m going to call it a win for these two E5470 computers.