Safely upgrading Mid-2014 Macbook Pro to Ventura (13.7.1)

DRAFT --- Not finshed writing. Importing images is NOT working  --- DRAFT 


Owning an older mid-2014 Macbook Pro, I needed to upgrade beyond High Sierra or Catalina. I am now successfully running macOS Ventura 13.7.1. This is possible with OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher. This software is amazing.

For my peace-of-mind, I needed a durable backup of my currently installed macOS that could be restored to get me back to exactly where I started, should something go wrong.

Here is a fantastic example of "something you can only do with Linux". Yes, you can boot a x86 Macbook from a Linux Live USB image!

First step: Create a trustworthy backup that can be restored without damaging my existing running Macbook. In order to do that 100% safely I needed a 2nd SSD hard disk. Should that restore fail, you just swap back to your original SSD with the working macOS, and you are back to where you stared. 

Step two: Obtain a compatible SSD hard disk for the backup/restore experiment. 

The item I purchased from Amazon "may have worked" but I was using Time Machine (TM) for backups. 

After much back-and-forth with User's Manual, contacting the vendor of that SSD, I never successfully achieved a restore I booted. I ultimately returned that SSD to Amazon.

In retrospect, I believe the issue was more how I was restoring the TM backup, or it just doesn't install the boot loader properly. Either way my many attempt s to restore the TM backup, may Macbook would not boot to a login screen.

Step three: Look up the part number of my SSD, and obtain an identical SSD from an eBay vendor. Be careful here. There are variants that have an aluminum heat sink that is too big to fit into a mid-2014 Macbook Pro. The suffix /OA1 (heat sink) vs / OA6 (naked SSD board) is the difference.

MZ-JPU512T/0A1 looks like this:

MZ-JPU512T/0A6 looks like this:

I used a Live Linux USB as part of upgrading my Macbook.

Why? I wanted a 100% byte-for-byte backup of my Macbook hard disk. 

How I did this:

- Booted from a Linux Pop!_OS 22.04 USB live ISO image

- DO NOT INSTALL: Skip / close that window after it is booted

- Connect a USB hard disk big enough to store your Macbook hard disk image (500GB in my case)

- Open a command terminal

- sudo su -

- lsblk

- Find your external USB disk device

- fdisk /dev/sda (example is sda, your name may be different)

- Delete any existing partitions with "d" command

- Create a new partition with "n" command and then accept all default values

- Verify partition is Linux with "p" command

- Use "t" and select 82 if partition is not Linux

- Use "w" command to write the partition table

- Use "q" to exit fdisk

- fdisk -l /dev/sda to print the partition table

- Create a new filesystem with this command:

  mkfs.ext4 -m 0 /dev/sda1

   use your value from fdisk -l above

- Wait 

- mkdir /tmp/backup

- mount /dev/sda1 /tmp/backup

- Look for the device names of your Macbook SSD with the lsblk  command

- dd if=/dev/MacSSDDevice  of=/tmp/backup/macos-disk-backup.dd  bs=1M status=progress

- Wait a long time.

You will see the progress made. It took about 40min for my 500GB disk to be imaged. 

Disaster Recovery:

You do not need to do this step!  This is a only used for disaster recovery step should the "Upgrade macOS" step below render your system unbootable. 

Skip this section and follow "Upgrade macOS" below.

To restore your macOS disk image by booting from your Linux ISO again. With your external USB disk connected all you need to is:

- Terminal with cli

- sudo su -

- mkdir /tmp/backup

- mount /dev/sda1 /tmp/backup

- Look for the device names of your Macbook SSD

- dd   if=/tmp/backup/macos-disk-backup.dd   of=/dev/MacSSDDevice   bs=1M status=progress

- Wait a long time.

- Notice the dd if= /  of= devices are reversed. Do not make a mistake here!!! This ordering is very important.

Upgrade macOS

Now reboot back into macOS and follow the OpenCore Legacy Patcher directions. Essentially you need a USB stick big enough to store the macOS image and this software. 

Upgrade only to the next version above what you are running. In my case I was on Catalina 10.15, so I had to upgrade to Big Sur 11, Monterey 12, then finally Ventura 13. I had upgrade from Catalina, as a software package I use daily was no longer supported starting January 2025. I found VMware Fusion did not work on versions less than macOS 13. That is how I got here.

Before running the upgrade, do these two things:

- Connect your Macbook to a power source

- Disable the screen locker

Each upgrade takes time, but once the upgrade is started, you can leave it and forget it. 

It reboot 4-5 times, looks scary, but in the end you have a working desktop that is on the next macOS version. All apps and customizations are preserved! You do not loose anything, like your super cool desktop background image. 

This project is very polished. 

This is more a tutorial of how to upgrade macOS, but Linux was the only way I could get a backup of my Macbook that was guaranteed to boot. 

Forget TimeMachine. It did NOT work for me. The disk was restored, but the system did NOT boot.