Advice needed: Upgrading Mac OS + PT for first time in years

[Ben Jenssen]

Originally Posted by hxcdelivery

WOW part of me was a little bit itching to move on to a newer PT and get clean / updated, and I still would not be able to use my google drive backup on the PT running part of my hard drive... But I did NOT know this was an option. Due to money and time constraints I'm going to give this a shot (partitioning my drive)! I have a bunch of space on my hard drive. I feel like this is the most safe and viable option, as I would not prefer to dabble in extra hard drives right now and I would ideally just like to keep my license. Thank you so much!

Anytime.
I assure you, this is a quite simple and easy way to combine old and new. I did it myself for years, Having PT10 w/mac os 10.6.8, and stepping gradually up towards High Sierra on the other partition. This on my old 2008 Mac pro.
Be shure to be backed up as you go along, and stay safe.

[Darryl Ramm]

Just be careful here. Catalia wants to run on an APFS file system and your current system may not be able to read APFS filesystems (needs 10.13 or later). But Catalina can read HFS+ volumes, so you have to think about how you do file sharing/copying between file systems. e.g. do any copying while booted from Catalina and able to read all file systems.

This may help get you started. https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/ins...ate-partition/

But again if you have a slow HDD I would consider take the opportunity to upgrade to SSD... even if you are going to dual boot... well maybe because you are going to dual boot and booting will be faster on SSD. In which case clone (with Carbon Copy Cloner) the current drive to an SSD in an external caddy and then do the partition and install on that... and if you have problems there you shave not damaged you old boot drive install.

And as you start working with this you will see APFS is different than HFS+, new concepts like APFS containers etc.

These non-retina MacBook Pros were nice exactly because they could be upgraded. And just for future references you can also replace the optical drive with another SSD (OWC sells the drive caddies, but I would use Samsung SSD with them) handy say if you were moving the MBP around. And this model, unlike others, supports SATA III for that optical bay so you get full performance out of those optical drives.

[Ben Jenssen]

OP quote:

Originally Posted by hxcdelivery

Please bear with me as I am not the most technologically savvy.

Darryl, all respect, your advice is as always infinitely valuable, but let's not discourage our friend. This is not very difficult.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Ben Jenssen

OP quote:

Darryl, all respect, your advice is as always infinitely valuable, but let's not discourage our friend. This is not very difficult.

I was not trying to, I carefully linked to a very good set of directions that are the best I have seen.

The warnings about APFS and HFS+ are real... folks here have been surprised by not being able to read the APFS volumes when dual booting.

I know exactly how I would do this and it would be done very quickly. But folks need to work out what the right approach is for themselves, and I sure recommend doing some reading and taking it slow if this sort of stuff is new.

[Ben Jenssen]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

I was not trying to, I carefully linked to a very good set of directions that are the best I have seen.

The warnings about APFS and HFS+ are real... folks here have been surprised by not being able to read the APFS volumes when dual booting.

I know exactly how I would do this and it would be done very quickly. But folks need to work out what the right approach is for themselves, and I sure recommend doing some reading and taking it slow if this sort of stuff is new.

Shure.

hxcdelivery: When you do the partitioning (After backing up), use HFS+ and not APFS, and you'll be alright.