Patrick Sheppard
Forum Replies Created
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Craig,
I’ve read differing opinions about whether to upgrade to Mojave or Catalina. I recently fixed an OS issue on a 2015 iMac that belongs to a friend, and that computer has Catalina installed. I actually wanted to do a clean install of Mojave since I had read a lot of bad things about Catalina, but I was unable to install Mojave because of what I believe was an incompatibility between Mojave and a firmware update from the previous Catalina installation. So I ended up doing a clean install of Catalina on an external drive, and then used Migration Assistant to move all of the files from the internal drive to the external drive. Once that was complete and I verified that all of the files migrated successfully, I reformatted the iMac’s internal drive and then used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the fresh OS install on the external drive to the iMac’s internal drive. It has been working flawlessly since then.
(A note about Carbon Copy Cloner: You HAVE to use version 5 to clone to an APFS-formatted drive. Mojave and above require APFS.)
As for upgrading your 2015 iMac vs. buying a new Mac, part of that depends on the ratio of cost to performance increase, aka “the most bang for your buck”. For example, will you see a significant enough increase in performance by upgrading the internal drive to an SSD and maybe adding more RAM? (40GB of RAM is already a fairly healthy amount, but I assume the iMac’s internal drive is a conventional “platter” hard drive which is much slower than an SSD.) If so, then upgrading would cost a small fraction of the amount of a new Mac, and with a 2015 iMac you’ll still be able to update macOS for at least another 2-3 years and enjoy improved overall performance during that time.
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Please see my reply above, it got posted above your last post
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Rainer,
Did you do the PRAM reset as described above? If so, then the TB port might be non-functional.
Are you already using the other three TB ports? If not, then plug the Echo and the dual display adapter into two other TB ports. Or, plug the display adapter into the TB port on back of the Echo for an inline connection of the Echo and the displays off of a single TB port.
If your other TB ports are already used, then looking at this from a financial standpoint, I suggest that you try to find a solution that allows you to keep your overall I/O setup the same while using other available functioning ports.
For example, can you reconfigure you overall I/O setup using the iMac’s USB ports for some of your requirements? What are you using the Echo for? The internal drive bay? The DVD burner? The USB or eSATA ports? I’m talking about evaluating your I/O needs and coming up with an alternate plan, even if that means purchasing other equipment to fill that need. Because the only other option I’m aware of is to take the iMac to Apple and see if they can fix the 4th TB port at what I assume would be a very high cost to you.
As an aside, and for what it’s worth, I like to use temperature monitoring/fan control software because it provides manual control over the fans in my Mac. I use TG Pro by Tunabelly Software. It works wonderfully, and it’s super cheap right now:
https://www.tunabellysoftware.com/tgpro/
I mention this because one cause of hardware failure is heat stress, and while I know that the iMac Pro has an excellent airflow system, high temps over time could still be the cause of the TB port issue, especially with high-volume data I/O through Thunderbolt docks. Software like TG Pro can be configured manually to increase your Mac’s baseline fan speed to keep things cooler inside than what Apple might deem necessary. Consistently lower heat means less stress on the computer and its components over time, which tends to equate to longer life.
What’s $10, or even $20, if it buys an extra 2 or 3 years of use vs. having to replace the computer sooner because some critical (and expensive) component failed due to prolonged heat stress?
Incidentally, I find another thing to be beneficial when it comes to longevity of computers/components/peripherals, and electronics in general: Surge protection/UPS devices, especially ones that regulate voltage and supply clean electricity. This comes down to the same thing: less stress on the computer and its components over time, which tends to equate to longer life.
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I’ve had very recent experience with this. I was trying to clean install Mojave onto an external drive connected to an iMac that has Catalina installed on it. The iMac was booted from a USB flash drive with High Sierra installed on it. The USB boot drive was necessary because the iMac’s Catalina install was having some issues, which is why I was doing all of this in the first place.
Anyway, it gave me this error message when I tried to install Mojave:
macOS could not be installed on your computer.
An error occurred while updating firmware.
Quit the installer to restart your computer and try again.​I tried a few times but it wouldn’t work. I think what happened was that Mojave was trying to update firmware that was already updated on the iMac which happened when the iMac was updated to Catalina, and that the firmware installed from the Catalina update was beyond whatever version of firmware came with my Mojave installer, and so Mojave tried to “update” the firmware and failed.
Then when I ran the Catalina installer, it completed without issues and was smooth sailing.
So it seems whether or not it can be done is a bit tricky, and it may depend on what firmware version the Mac has…?
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Woohoo!!! 🙂
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Using .zip archives is a good idea because the .zip format uses lossless compression, and because the .zip archive acts as a container, protecting the original media file that it contains.
However, it matters whether or not the media file was uploaded as a .zip file as well. Since corruption can happen, it can happen during both upload and download.
If you want to be really safe about it, then whoever is uploading media files to you should be compressing the files they send into .zip archives prior to uploading. Or in the case of WeTransfer, their site automatically creates .zip archives when uploading more than one file at a time. I assume there are other file transfer services that behave the same way.
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How about:
Bessie’s Bovacious Industry Banter
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Try a PRAM reset. First disconnect all external devices/peripherals except for the mouse and keyboard. Then restart and immediately press and hold the Command+Option+P+R keys until the Mac cycles through three extra startup sounds (that’s 4 total times you’ll hear the startup sound, once for the regular startup sound and three others for the three PRAM reset cycles). Then release the keys and reconnect your externals and see if the Echo 15 is working.
If not, maybe the driver needs to be reinstalled. I once owned a Sonnet Tempo SSD Pro Plus card, and I had to re-install the driver after I upgraded from Mavericks to Yosemite. Perhaps a similar issue occurred in your case, even though it was triggered by a security update rather than an OS upgrade.
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A section in the first post of this MacRumors thread answers your question I believe. I’ve copied and pasted that section here for your convenience, since the post is very, very long:
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– 144.0.0.0.0 and previous macOS releases note:
Yes, BootROM 144.0.0.0.0 can boot even 10.6.8, no problem, but you are limited to GPU driver support since you can’t boot a macOS versions that don’t have drivers for your GPU. For example, with AMD RX 4xx/5xx GPUs, you are limited to 10.12.6/10.13/10.14.​
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Note the portion in bold. According to this, you should be good to boot into Sierra with the 144.0.0.0.0 firmware since it works all the way back to Snow Leopard (with the GPU caveats noted by the OP).
Here is the link to the thread for your reference. It has a lot of helpful info and I highly recommend reading it thoroughly:
I intend to upgrade my (flashed to 5,1) Mac Pro to Mojave as well, once I get a Metal-compatible GPU.