Mavericks (10.9) to Catalina (10.15) via El Capitan (10.11)

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Level 2

373 points

Mavericks (10.9) to Catalina (10.15) via El Capitan (10.11)

I'd like some reassurance here.

I installed a new OSX 10.11 on a partition of the internal drive of my late 2013 iMac. The other partition has 10.9.5. Then I went the whole hog and installed OSX 10.15 on an external drive.

When I did a restart after several hours of setting up Catalina, it booted into Mavericks, and the Catalina drive was nowhere to be found. Not on the desktop, not in Disk Utility, not in the Sidebar, nowhere. I thought: Uh, oh!

This non-appearance is a problem for me because I want to switch between Mavericks and Catalina on a regular basis. However, when I shutdown and started up again several hours later, up came Catalina. This leads to a few questions:

Q1. If the non-appearance of Catalina happens again, is it possible to bring up the Catalina disk from within Mavericks?

Q2. Is there a key combination I can press during startup which will force all disks to appear?

Q3. I now want to turn my new Catalina into a disk image. Is that best done from within Catalina, or should I boot into Mavericks (or El Capitan) and do it from there?

Q4. I've been running Mavericks without a recovery partition ever since I bought my iMac in 2013 and removed it. Now that I've installed El Capitan and Catalina on other partitions, do those partitions now have Recovery Partitions?

The reason I ask is that I played around with Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my various OSXes, and it said that creating a Recovery Partition would be a good idea, but it never could.

Code for access to Apple

And other question on a different topic: when trying to log into Apple on Catalina, it said I needed a code – which then appeared on the screen. But, in days gone by when such a message appeared when setting up Mavericks or El Capitan, a message said the code has been sent to my other device (running Mavericks). I never ever saw the code, so I always had to opt for a phone call.

Q5. Does Mavericks not accept these codes?

Posted on Jul 2, 2024 2:50 AM

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Answer 1

MartinR

Level 7

20,173 points

Jul 2, 2024 5:58 AM in response to Guy Burns

I can only answer a few of your questions. Others will need to chime in.

Catalina is installed on an APFS-formatted drive. Mavericks & El Capitan don't know anything about APFS, so they cannot "see" the APFS drive. Hence,

When booted into Catalina you "should" be able to set the startup disk to the Catalina, Mavericks or El Capitan drives; also on Catalina, add System Preferences to Full Disk Access (See System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy > Full Disk Access.)
When booted into Mavericks or El Capitan you will not be able to set the startup disk to Catalina

When you start your iMac, hold down the Option key while it starts up. You should then get a screen allowing you to choose the boot drive.

While it is possible to create a Catalina disk image, it would be better to use CCC to clone your Catalina drive to another drive. And you would need to do this while booted into Catalina. My recollection is that CCC .dmg's of Catalina drives aren't 100%

Catalina has its own recovery partition; no need to do anything there. I do not suggest creating any new or extra recovery partitions. Things have changed so much in macOS it could create problems if you did.

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Answer 2

HWTech

Level 9

57,026 points

Jul 2, 2024 8:50 AM in response to Guy Burns

If you want a seemless experience booting easily between these operating systems, then I suggest you use rEFInd which is a graphical boot manager. All of the code except for the initial script that is downloaded will be stored on the hidden EFI (aka ESP) partition. If you happen to reset the PRAM, then you may need to reselect the rEFInd boot manager as the default Startup Disk in System Preferences.

https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

As for the access Codes.....I'm not sure how far back on operating systems Apple's Messages app will work. Plus even though you may be signed into your AppleID, the sending of codes may require a newer OS. You should be able to select the "Text" option when you see the prompt about receiving a code....this gives you an opportunity to send the code via traditional text message instead which should work if Messages has basic functionality on the older OS. Some newer & fancier features definitely will not work.

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