Multiple Versions of OS X/macOS

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Level 1

8 points

Multiple Versions of OS X/macOS

Hello,

I have a mid 2009 MacBook Pro with the 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 8GB of RAM. It currently runs OS X 10.6.8, and has about 340GB of free space on its SSD. After researching, it looks like the newest operating system supported on this machine is OS X El Capitan, however, in the App Store on the machine, macOS Catalina is available. Do you know if macOS Catalina would actually run on this machine?

Also, I occasionally use programs which will not run on newer versions of OS X/macOS. Since this machine has so much space available, is it possible to dual boot the current installation of 10.6.8 and a newer clean installation of either El Capitan or Catalina? My primary motivation for updating is gaining access to updated internet browsers, I don't mind many advanced features of the new OS are slow or non-functional due to the age of the hardware.

Thanks for your input.

MacBook Pro

Posted on Mar 26, 2020 8:41 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Grant Bennet-Alder

Level 10

133,201 points

Mar 26, 2020 5:56 PM in response to techwiz001

The Utilities you are used to finding on the 10.6 Installer/Utilities disk: Disk Utility, Installer, and Time Machine Restore among others, are also available in the Recovery partition loaded onto a drive where El Capitan is installed. If you install onto an external drive, and hold down Option while you boot, that Recovery HD will be one of the Volumes you can boot from.

Boot from the 10.11 El Capitan Recovery HD, and you should be free to re-arrange your boot drive any way you like, including creating a new Volume and Restoring or Installing onto it.

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Answer 2

Mar 26, 2020 9:01 AM in response to techwiz001

Macs can boot from many different drives, Internal or External. To experiment without trashing your current setup, connect an external drive, install MacOS on that External drive and run from the external drive.

Your MacBook Pro has only USB-2 which would be very slow. The fastest external enclosure for a MacBook Pro 2009 would be Firewire.

How to upgrade to OS X El Capitan - Apple Support

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Answer 3

techwiz001 Author

Level 1

8 points

Mar 26, 2020 3:42 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Sounds good, thanks for the info.

Just to be clear, the following steps:

Perform a Time Machine backup to an external drive
Enter the Recovery environment using the DVD that came with the machine
Partition the SSD using the recovery environment
Boot into old OS X on freshly partitioned drive
Launch installer for new OS X and point to empty partition

minimize the risk of data loss, correct?

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Answer 4

Mar 26, 2020 3:37 PM in response to techwiz001

Partitioning the boot drive is always risky. Best results are obtained by the more recent version of MacOS or Recovery doing the partitioning.

ALWAYS have a complete backup of everything in case, "oops, your drive is wiped, sorry."

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Answer 5

Mar 26, 2020 3:49 PM in response to techwiz001

That procedure gives you the Disk Utility from 10.6.8. that is NOT the version I recommend, since it knows nothing about El Capitan.

Once you have installed a later version of MacOS, you will have a recovery HD installed on that boot drive, that is much smarted about what is needed for ElCapitan (and presumably is backward compatible with 10.6.8

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