Installing macOS Sonoma On A 2009 Mac Mini (OpenCore Legacy Patcher)

In today's video we install macOS Sonoma on the World's Fastest 2009 Mac Mini using OpenCore Legacy Patcher
Krazy Ken Video Link (It isn't showing properly in the video): • Installing macOS Catal...
Patcher Link: dortania.github.io/OpenCore-L...
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:44 Where I've Been
1:12 The 2009 Mac Mini Intro
1:58 USB Issues During Setup
3:04 Booting into the Krazy Ken Install
5:16 Making The Install Drive
8:48 Installer Boot Up & All My Mental Issues Continue
10:56 Disk Utility Drive Setup
11:49 Installing Sonoma
13:35 Sonoma First Boot & Setup
14:43 The Desktop Demo & Glitches
16:07 Troubleshooting
19:30 It's Fixed
19:44 Real Demo
23:58 Wrap Up
28:33 Outro
30:01 The Unused MacBook Air Video Excerpts
32:31 End Credits
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Hrutkay Mods Intro by Athlon
My Patreon Credit Music:
Mac OS X by Athlon
My Outro Music:
Trinitron by Athlon
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[@Charlesdavid2009]

Always cracks me up that ads seem to load like they’re on hyper 5g inter dimensional internet then the real video has to buffer for 10 years

[@HrutkayMods]

Yeah that always annoys me too 🤣 thanks for sticking around tho

[@thescinema]

Using OpenCore patcher i just managed a clean install of Ventura on my 2011 Mac Mini Server from an OpenCore-created install USB, installed all of the latest updates to Ventura, and then did an in-place upgrade to Sonoma flawlessly thanks to the OpenCore automations on which they've obviously been working very hard. I'm genuinely impressed what these older machines are still quite capable of.

[@HrutkayMods]

It is indeed impressive

[@ichris1613]

were you able to install the ventura version on mac mini 5.1 (2011)?

[@macintush]

Yooo nice 👍 good to see you posting

[@HrutkayMods]

I’ve only been gone a week 🤣

[@Gravarty]

Huge props to the Legacy OpenCore team for getting Sonoma running on these macs in such a short time. I remember how long it took to have a stable version for Big Sur. I have Sonoma running on my Late 2009 27" iMac, which is own since early 2010 and it had all macOS versions (starting with 10.6 SL) running on it.

[@HrutkayMods]

Yeah they’ve been working on it since the beta releases this time

[@rickkarrer8370]

I’m just glad I’m not the only that gets mad and hits the keyboard when something “little” like this holds up a whole process lol.

[@HrutkayMods]

You don’t understand Rick by this point I had already failed at filming five hours of another video 🤣 I was at this point just fed up with even trying

[@dysfunctionalwombat]

A little tip for the future, macs with the IR reciever for the remotes support remote control of the boot picker. Just hold down menu at startup and use the nav buttons to use it and boot. Anyways, great video as usual, this makes me want to try it on my 2008 24" iMac

[@WhatTheFlash-cx6ox]

Huh, I didn’t know this, I will definitely try that. Fairly sure my Mac mini from 2012 has an IR, though not currently at home. I also have an old IR remote from my 2008-ish MacBook, so I am keen to see if I can try this.

[@HrutkayMods]

I didn’t know that either Aaron I’ll have to try that

[@dysfunctionalwombat]

the 2012 (up to the 2014) minis have IR receivers so you're golden

[@DavidStahlOLDHAPPyMACs]

WoW that’s Fun Greg I feel your Pain

[@HrutkayMods]

Yeah it was painful Dave lol

[@awakeFromNib]

Successful installation 👍

[@HrutkayMods]

Finally lol this video took me about 10 hours of filming times between the 2 videos lol

[@FLUFFS]

Hey, you made a nice video! Did you test out if the dvd drive still works?

[@HrutkayMods]

It should work fine yes… it’s only a problem with the early 2008 model Macs cause they use IDE on the ODD drive

[@cjsebes]

Your experiences mirror the difficulties I had, including the patcher not working at the end. I had to reboot to restart the patcher after force-quitting it. I was able to use a newer chicklet-style Apple keyboard without a USB hub. Apparently it's USB 2.0. Anyway, that's what I did when I used OCLP on my Mac Pro 5,1. And it took a few tries to get it to work. I was getting the "no" symbol. I didn't know what the problem was but was trying to go back and forth between the original 5770 video card and the Vega 56 I was using previously. I eventually got it working with Big Sur and let it upgrade to Sonoma. One complication I had was me not realizing that my KVM was switching to another computer between some boots or video card swaps. It took me about a day and a half to figure it out. I could probably do it in my sleep now. Or maybe those will be nightmares. I'll let you know.

[@HrutkayMods]

At least you got it going lol

[@cjsebes]

Through stubbornness, patience, and tenacity, yes. All things that us geeks tend to share. Good on you for persevering and getting yours going. And super kudos to the OCLP community for developing this great solution.

[@jimcabezola3051]

I thought I was doing well using OCLP to install Monterey on this 2011 Mac Mini! Now...Sonoma on a 2009? Fantastic! Which reminds me...I haven't run the Sonoma upgrade on my M1 Mac Mini yet, lol! Experimenting with OCLP has been wonderful fun. Maybe I should try OCLP on this 2011 and multi-boot it with my Linux installs.

[@HrutkayMods]

I’ve installed Sonoma on both this mini and my 2014 Air at this point… still running Ventura on my M1 Max and 2011 iMac and even older on my other Macs

[@BrockSuire75]

Ive been on macOS 14.0 for a week now on my 2010 cMP. The AMD 570 & 580 RX both work out the box. My latest adventure is getting my AMD 6650 XT to work. Ive tried all of the tips & tricks from the internet, but no luck as of yet.

[@HrutkayMods]

Good luck and keep me updated... text me bud

[@Ll3maFN]

Love oclp

[@HrutkayMods]

It sure has come a long way for sure!

[@Ll3maFN]

@@HrutkayMods definitly

[@Techlevel1534.]

I will buy one of those interesting white cinema displays. They look very cool and maybe the quality is great too

[@HrutkayMods]

Quality is great if the backlight works and the LCD is damage free… they don’t ship well and the stands break off easily plus you have to have the ADC to DVI adapter for newer systems and they don’t support HDCP

[@Techlevel1534.]

@@HrutkayMods oh

[@jonesing4fame922]

To my recollection, both monitor ports on the 2009 Mac Mini need to be connected to separate displays in order to enable all the hardware graphic acceleration capabilities, FWIW.

[@HrutkayMods]

Nah just the glitched driver install caused the issues... I didn't mention there is beta drivers from acceleration that apparently doesn't install by default until you redo the root patches

[@janquieldapper]

I Will intall in my late 2009 iMac!

[@HrutkayMods]

It should work great 😊

[@lukchem]

When I installed Sonoma on my Moms 2012 Mac Mini is an Upgrade install, it for some reason booted into Catalina after the first restart, which was kinda cursed. After manually booting back into the installer it continued fine.

[@HrutkayMods]

Yep pretty common

[@Techlevel1534.]

Cool! I made a similar video about my 2011 MacBook Pro running Mac OS Sonoma. It lags a little bit

[@HrutkayMods]

Well you can only do so much with slow acceleration lol

[@95Comics]

Will this work on a stock a1283 mini? It has 4gigs and a regular hard drive. If i need to upgrade it first i will if it will work afterwards

[@HrutkayMods]

Yeah I'd recommend 8GB and an SSD but it'll work outta the box it'll just be slow

[@beewee7895]

ask sir, my mac mini 2006 can't normaly boot, only hear a fan with big wind.. not sound apple chime and no display on monitor... why?

[@HrutkayMods]

My 2009 is doing the same thing now not really sure could be a lot of different things causing it

[@beardandfriends8227]

Hi does that mac mini have a ssd? From what I understand the newer os wont run on a hdd

[@HrutkayMods]

It does... highly recommended to have max RAM and an SSD before running anything past High Sierra. but it will run at minimum specs of 2GB of RAM and an HDD. it'll just run really slow. But if it's not your main system and you want to try it out... you can totally use a HDD. I use an HDD on my 2011 and 2013 iMacs and it takes about 5 minutes to load from boot. but once loaded it's pretty snappy considering

[@beardandfriends8227]

@@HrutkayMods thank you sir appreciate the message back

[@boogiedownnyc]

Opencore manager is top tier

[@HrutkayMods]

It has sure come a long way I was one of the early testers and it did not work well at first

[@dynahzm]

planning to opencore my late 2011 imac after ssd upgrade by early next year

[@HrutkayMods]

Should work great

[@jdryyz]

I tried running the latest OCLP (13.0) but could not use it to create a Sonoma installation because it says I need to have High Sierra first. My Mac mini 2009 has El Capitan on it at the moment. So I then used another mac to create a Sonoma USB installer *for the Mac mini 3,1 model.* The resulting USB drive is not bootable on the mac. I see the UEFI icon but then get a circle with a line through it. Do I first need to use an older OCLP to get High Sierra on this 2009 Mac mini before I can step up to Sonoma? The release does not have a High Sierra download option.

[@HrutkayMods]

You can make the installer drive then just install overtop your existing install… I’ve been having a lot of problems with 1.3.0 try using 1.2.1 and a slightly older Sonoma or try Ventura. Ventura works wonderfully

[@jdryyz]

@@HrutkayMods I can make the installer USB for Sonoma but it is not bootable. I have since found a guide to get High Sierra on my 2009 mini and completed that yesterday. I will try running OCLP again from the 3,1 mini and see if it will advance through the steps this time.

[@jdryyz]

Yeah, after getting High Sierra on there, the OCLP process for the Sonoma install went well. While I am surprised at how smoothly Sonoma runs on the 2009 Mac mini with a Core 2 Duo processor and 8GB RAM, it still falls short of the level of snappiness I would prefer. My 2012 Mac min is probably a much better candidate for an OCLP upgrade. You say Ventura is working out better for you? Just for the install part or the actual usability on the hardware? I only have a 2.6GHz processor by the way. Maybe your 3.0 GHz makes a difference in this case. 😀

[@HrutkayMods]

@@jdryyz OpenCore just seems a bit unstable with the latest Sonoma, its all active development on it, Ventura isn't gonna change much now. So it's just works. In fact I'm literally downgrading to Ventura on it as I type this. It works with Sonoma fine, I just like the stability of Ventura better, shoot My M1 Max is still running Ventura lol

[@jdryyz]

@@HrutkayMods thanks for the tip. I will try downgrading. I settled on Monterey on a 2018 mini I have. It has some quirks but I'm okay with it for the most part. If Ventura works out well on the 2009 mini, I may switch to it on the native hardware Mac.

[@dynahzm]

Did you upgrade the hard drive of th mac mini to an ssd?

[@HrutkayMods]

Yeah and when you do yours don’t forget to do the temp sensor mod so your fans still work properly

[@dynahzm]

@@HrutkayMods ik already

[@michaelscottcutler3627]

Like I wrote on LEM yesterday, "...it looks tricky." Then someone came back with, "It's not tricky. It's a turnkey operation." Bullshit.

[@HrutkayMods]

Yeah, we all know it’s not turnkey. It’s a little tricky but it’s still worth it… honestly, the MacBook Air might be as simple as installing Ventura, and then upgrading to Sonoma

[@michaelscottcutler3627]

@@HrutkayMods What about a 2008 17" MBP? Some of the online tutorials say anything older than 2012 will be a disappointment. What do you say, Gregg?

[@itoilinks]

I am selling a mac mini 2011 with Ventura 13.2.1, how do I clear it for a new owner?????

[@HrutkayMods]

Many different ways you can do it, if you want all of your stuff off of it… hard drive I would recommend using a professional wiping software before hand, SSD It doesn’t matter once it’s deleted it’s gone. But if you’re just wiping it and not too concerned about it, the easiest option probably would be using the open core Legacy patcher install Drive going to disk utility and set up and wiping the whole drive and then just reinstall it for the new user. Or you could also just use High Sierra since it’s the last official supported one on it and let the new owner deal with unsupported OSes later, which is probably what I would do… I can’t remember if they have Internet recovery on them but I think they might and if that’s the case you can just literally boot into Internet recovery and wipe it from there, and then reinstall with High Sierra

[@Phatg98]

Still selling that Mac mini?

[@rickkarrer8370]

Almost a 25 year old computer. It would kind of be like running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on the original Macintosh 128k (do the math lol).

[@HrutkayMods]

Wouldn’t that be almost 15 years? Lol and yeah but when you think of it this way, the base Intel computer hasn’t changed much at all since the mid-2000s except for speed. I mean you can run windows 11 on a 2006 Mac pro. Lol

[@Realford.gaming]

I would like to see a mid 2012 MacBook Air to see what the limit is for open core

[@HrutkayMods]

Should run pretty good. In fact, it will run like a modern day, Mac, more or less. Metal acceleration and everything.

[@Realford.gaming]

@@HrutkayMods yea could do but is there any limitations on it?

[@HrutkayMods]

Any Mac made since 2012, other than the 5,1 cMP without the upgraded GPU, has metal and as long as the drivers are installed properly, it just works. Now there are some applications that require the metal two and metal three GPUs but the metal one GPU I have never seen a problem yet with them. those applications still seem to work fine I’m sure there’s a few apps out there that won’t work but in my experience everything works fine no issues whatsoever.

[@ramfrancisuk]

Looks like you need two keyboards and mice plugged in simultaneously

[@HrutkayMods]

With this hub yeah, that would've made it a bit easier

[@walterb.9290]

OCLP has NEVER !!! automatically installed root patches. It will alert you to do it, but it will NOT install them without user input. The OC efi will fake a supported system so the OS installer will run. After that the OC efi needs to be installed on the internal drive, as well as the root patches applied. But it ALL requires user input. FYI.

[@HrutkayMods]

OCLP 1.0.1 is mostly automated now have you actually tried it? It auto loaded everything it just didn’t install the beta blur drivers on the first install that’s why it was so laggy at first but you saw it yourself it already had the root drivers installed. I dunno why but it was a fresh install so I say it auto installs now just not very well yet. I assumed it needed user input like the previous versions but looking back at it it did it on my 14 MacBook Air when I upgraded also 🤷🏻‍♂️

[@walterb.9290]

@@HrutkayMods I've been messing with OCLP since it's inception lol. Trust me, There have been so much silly problems with it, to make the whole process a luck of the draw imo. So many factors are in play here. Trust me, user input is needed, next to a very important thing; patience. You must let it do its thing.

[@HrutkayMods]

@@walterb.9290 agreed With that… and I have too… first versions were rough but worked… sorta… still have an old version on my 2007 iMac and 2011 MBP I haven’t updated yet… they don’t work well when I boot them lol

[@HrutkayMods]

@walterb.9290 I figured it out watching someone else's video... If you select the model when you make the install drive it'll try to auto install the drivers during the install, if you don't it'll default to no drivers in OCLP 1... still very glitched though

[@dynahzm]

Ok so ur oclp 0.4.5 update broke ok

[@mattstone8878]

I'm having a shitty problem. My brother pooped in my Macbook Air 11 inch and closed the lid. I didn't find it for years and years. It was hard to open as the poop essentially turned to brown cement. Now its a Crapbook Pro. 💩

[@HrutkayMods]

Yikes 😖

[@wesstatzer163]

Oh hey another mac mini 😂

[@HrutkayMods]

🤣 boy do I have a lot 🤣

[@mks-h]

DUDE don't hit the keyboard!

[@HrutkayMods]

No keyboards were seriously harmed in the filming of this video

[@mikepxg6406]

Pointless doing this on any mac without metal graphics. it will be almost unusable. By the way, Do you have a mental disability.

[@HrutkayMods]

Ding ding ding hit you the nail on the head... yes I'm psychotic I'm glad you noticed Mike... Most take a few videos to realize I'm crazy but your keen sense caught onto it in the first video you watched! I'm proud of you 😃. Anyway You'd be surprised most Apps still run off of OpenCL and the apps that require Metal usually require too much horsepower for these old CPUs anyway. It would suck to try to run them anyway. System as a daily light use driver is still pretty good and useful. Hope this clears clears everything up and hope you day is going well 👍

[@editiongamingyt5761]

@mikepxg6406 bud, you dont have to be rude, he is just seeing what the experience is like. In fact I installed sonoma on my mid 2010 macbook pro. Its great, stay positive! BTW loving that cenima display!