Yes. There’s a firmware update, among other things.

Boom! We have Mojave!

You guys rock. Thank you so much!

quote:

Originally posted by vthoky:
Having typed that, now I have a message saying "About 37 minutes remaining." Looks like we're on the right path now.

Take those "minutes remaining" with a grain of salt. 37 minutes can become 15 minutes as the install progresses. I've had an install appear to stall with "less than one minute remaining". It sat stalled for 15 minutes before it finally went on and completed.
 
Having fully installed, you will want to visit System Preferences/Software Update to get the latest security updates and Safari versions.
 
Hang on to that installer stick. You can also use it to refresh your install if you run into problems with a future security update. Boot it up, and without erasing your drive, just select Install. It will install only the system files and leave all of your data and settings alone. You will have to re-run Software Update after doing this to get stuff back up to date. Needless to say, make a backup before you do this.

Well. Having walked through this process, I think I understand now why the drive Leeann sent me a while back wasn't doing the job: it's because I wasn't doing the job correctly. I probably could have saved a lot of hassle if I had done a better job of working smarter about it instead of working harder with it.

Anyway, I'm here to again offer a "thank you" to all who helped.

To sum it up: I swapped a solid-state drive into Mama's MBP, (finally) got Mojave onto it, and got the latest updates. Sweet. It runs a lot faster now, and that was part of the goal. As what appears to be a bonus, I find tonight that this machine will accept the Catalina upgrade. That's installing now, and I'm looking forward to dinking around with that a little.

One of the questions remaining has to do with Mama's bookmarks. I backed up her old "spinner" drive via Time Machine. If I tried to do a restore from Time Machine to the SSD, would that work out for me? Or is there a slick way to export her Safari bookmarks from the spinner to a jump drive, and then pull that collection onto the SSD install? If necessary, I'll drop the spinner back in place, hand-copy the bookmarks, put the SSD back in and manually add them. There are only a dozen or so... not a "yuge" deal.

Interstingly, my own MacBook Pro (also a Mid-2012) won't accept the Catalina upgrade -- something about "This volume is not formatted as APFS).


- - - - - - -

ETA: Mama's MBP has been sitting here for an hour or so with an "About a minute remaining..." message on screen.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: vthoky,

quote:

Originally posted by vthoky:
One of the questions remaining has to do with Mama's bookmarks. I backed up her old "spinner" drive via Time Machine. If I tried to do a restore from Time Machine to the SSD, would that work out for me?

I believe the "restore" option you are looking for is called "Migration Assistant". I've only looked at MA once, and that was helping a neighbor, not using it myself. But it did offer choices as to what to restore. I don't recall if Safari, or bookmarks specifically, was one of the choices.

quote:

Originally posted by vthoky:
ETA: Mama's MBP has been sitting here for an hour or so with an "About a minute remaining..." message on screen.

Wait it out. See my message directly above yours regarding "time remaining" lies.

quote:

Originally posted by henryaz:
Wait it out. See my message directly above yours regarding "time remaining" lies.

Sure enough. A couple of restarts have taken place and it's got another "13 minutes" bar going on. I'll walk away from it for a while and let it do its thing.


- - - - - - -

Edit: Done! Mama's got Catalina on an SSD now, and her little MBP is a bunch quicker than it used to be.

Thanks again, all!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: vthoky,

Migration Assistant will let you suck over whatever part of her old system you want.

Your machine will update to Catalina, but you'll need to convert your Mac OS Extended (Journaled) drive to APFS. I find it odd that yours wasn't converted - I think 10.11 was the first installer to convert the drives during install.

To convert:
1. Restart in recovery mode (Hold command-R while starting).
2. Open Disk Utility
3. Click on the SSD volume, then click the Unmount button (this is the trick).
4. In the Edit menu, you can now select Convert to APFS.
5. Proceed and done

Some people didn't have to unmount the drive first, all they had to do was right-click on the drive and choose Convert to APFS. Once you've done that, the Catalina install should proceed.