MacBook Upgrade

I’ve been, unexpectedly, using the 2011 MacBook Pro that Greg gave me a lot. As the OS (High Sierra) is outdated on it, I don’t really do much important stuff with it - I run my Quassel client (because it’s unsigned, and I don’t want to turn off app signing on my work machine, but sometimes IRC is useful for work things), and I do the updates for this site on it (in order to avoid compromising all the private Git repositories, it has a separate key that only connects to the Git repo for the site, which Netlify then pulls from).

I do a bit of web browsing on it, but I don’t have 1Password on it so it’s fairly limited to what I can access from it. I was logged into Twitter and Facebook on it until today for instance, because I have to type the password by hand. It’s not on my work VLAN, so the risk of it getting compromised is somewhere on par with my kid downloading a bad Minecraft mod. I try to convince myself that this is OK.

Anyway, because it had the 5400 RPM hard disk in it, things were fairly miserable even with 16GB RAM. But I have an old 240GB SSD laying around, so why not upgrade things? Why not indeed!

It’s complicated by the NVRAM hacks I put in place to disable the defective GPU - if I manage to reset the NVRAM, it’ll try use a GPU that I disconnected, and then I’d be in a bit of trouble.

So I decided to resize the partition on the hard drive down to 200GB, then take the disk out and use dd on a Linux machine to copy the data across. This failed spectacularly - after about 7.8GB I got “no space left on device” and it jacked up the partition table.

So I decided “screw it” and just set about installing a fresh copy. The “internet recovery” wanted to install Lion, which sucked, and I couldn’t find a USB stick with High Sierra on it. So I bit my fingernails and installed Lion, then had to upgrade to Sierra, then High Sierra (High Sierra won’t install directly over Lion).

But after a couple hours everything worked, and the boot-up speed is slashed… from about 1:45 down to around 40 seconds!

Horsham, VIC, Australia

Author:

fwaggle

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Location:

Horsham, VIC, Australia

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