How to run Mavericks on too old hardware

Why my Mac Mini from 2008 (model 2,1) went from Snow Leopard to Lion to Mavericks in the last 24 hours.

I like my Mac Mini. It’s the first Mac I ever bought, on a whim, and it’s served me well both as a workstation and lately more of a combined NAS, Minecraft and darknet server. I populated it with 4 (3.3 usable) GB RAM from the outset, and a few years ago I switched out its 5,400 rpm hard drive for an SSD.

If I remember correctly it came with Leopard but I bought Snow Leopard on the same day, or just afterwards. Earlier this year Apple stopped supporting Snow Leopard with security updates (in my opinion, I know others disagree). Understandable, somewhat, and while I knew I could update it to Lion I had never really come around to doing so.

The amount of apps not compatible with SL (Github , I’m looking at you) were quite low and often they seemed to require Mountain Lion anyway. But. As a somewhat Internet facing machine I felt I needed to make sure it at least got security updates, and thus I upgraded it to Lion yesterday.

It was a huge pain freeing up enough space on the internal SSD to be able to remove the per user FileVault encryption - but eventually I got it done. And realized way too late that turning on full disc encryption with FileVault 2 kind of defeated the purpose of having a headless NAS in a closet - since any reboot now meant I had to connect at least a keyboard, possibly a screen.

A quick search realized that I wasn’t alone  in feeling cheated - apparently in 10.8.2 (Mountain Lion) and Mavericks Apple added a possibility to pre-authorize  an account when scheduling a restart because of this.

Lion is the end-of-the-line when it comes to OS support for my Mac Mini 2,1. It’s a 32 bit EFI system, and Mountain Lion onwards  require 64 bit EFI support.

Enter a hacker under the alias Tiamo and a script written by a Mac Sysadm named Oem, called SFOTT . Sixty Four on Thirty Two. The script takes a valid Mavericks (or Mountain Lion) installation .app and patches it to consider the target hardware valid.

It also uses a shim layer (Tiamo’s boot.efi ) to patch through the 64 bit kernel syscalls to the 32 bit EFI on too-old hardware. My Macmini2,1  is now running the latest version of Mavericks.

That’s pretty awesome. Not yet headless with full disk encryption though - the pre-auth functionality has its own hardware requirements and still does not work. Bummer.