Last night I got my old black MacBook up and running on Mac OS X Lion, and it was a hell of a trip. Not sure whether to Tweet it or write a tiny blog post about it. Not sure anyone would even care.

Erm... that's not meant to sound like self-pity, it's just so old I'm not sure there's an audience for the ridiculous lengths I went to, to get it running.

OK, Imma tweet it. Just let me grab a glass of wine.

Firstly, the @ALDIAustralia "Claire Creek" 2018 Merlot is excellent.

Anyway, on with the story.

I'm the proud(?... yeah, I guess) owner of a 2007 Black Macbook. ("MacBook2,1")

Looks like this:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.16GHz CPU, 2Gb of RAM. I'd upgraded the hard drive at some stage in the past to a 500Gb Seagate Momentus.

It was literally sitting in a box in the shed; having just resurrected a 2009 White Polycarb MacBook(6,1) & got macOS Catalina running on it, "why not?"

Plugged it in and booted it up. Battery dead. Not just discharged. Dead. Shuffled off this mortal coil. Pining for the fjords.

Battery look like this.

It booted though. First thing I got was a boot menu. (I *will* come back to that).

It was running Mac OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard, & BootCamp/Win XP. Slow as a wet weekend, though.

Had a couple of old 120Gb SSDs spare, and given the potential uses for it, decided to install one.

My "main" Mac is a Mid-2012 MacBook Pro. It's running the latest version of macOS (Catalina). 1Tb SSD, 16Gb of RAM. Last of the truly upgradeable MacBook Pro's. I had to choose between that and the first Retina MBP, and no regrets.

It's *still* a beast of a machine.

From my experience with replacing the hard drive with an SSD in the MBP, figured it might make the old MB vaguely usable.

The 2012 MacBook Pro (9,1) has 10 screws you remove from the base, and you're in. Everything is fairly easily accessible. I've had it apart several times.

The 2007 MacBook? Not so much. Now, to be fair to Apple, had everything gone to plan, it's actually *easier* to upgrade the RAM and hard drive than in the MBP.

Take out the battery. Undo three captive screws and remove a retaining bracket. Eject the RAM with the levers.

Slide the plastic tab on the hard drive out from underneath, and pull the hard drive towards you, and it slides out.

Four Torx screws, remove the hard drive from the carrier, put in the SSD, put the screws back in, and...

...that's when everything went to hell.

Here's the thing. Apple made an interesting design choice 13 years ago. The Torx screws stick out about 2mm from each side of the drive. The drive bay has guide rails that mate with the heads of the screws.

The guide rails are made of flexible silicone, glued to the chassis.

Now, I can see the sense in it. The silicone provides vibration dampening for the hard drive. An elegant solution... 13 years ago.

The glue holding them in place is also 13 years old. That... was not so elegant any more.

The other problem? The original drive (and the 500Gb replacement) were both 9mm drives. The SSD is only 7mm high.

I attached the screws, tried to slide the drive in, and the MacBook drive bay suddenly had a bouncer.

"You're not coming in here looking like that, mate".

The old tech-support adage, "if all else fails, try brute force"... is not something you should try with a laptop.

I removed the half-inserted drive, and grabbed my handy-dandy magnetic-LED-extendable-torch that I bought for like $5 on a whim from SuperCheapAuto

...and folks, THAT was how I learned about the silicone guide rails.

Since one of them was just sitting in the middle of the drive bay, relaxing like Scott Morrison taking credit for... well, anything.

There was no way that was going back in there without some serious dismantling.

I can highly recommend the excellent work by the folks at @iFixit. Their teardown instruction guides are excellent, and it had been a long time since I'd pulled the case off this thing.

There were another 20 screws, of various sizes, and in various locations that had to be removed.

One of the instructions says "be very careful, as these three screws are easily stripped."

Apparently, I was not careful last time. Only one of them went back in this time.

After all those screws are removed, you wiggle the entire top/keyboard/trackpad assembly out, and this gives access to the top of the drive bay. Cleaned off the glue, added a couple of dabs of superglue to the back of the guide rail, slid the drive in while I had it open.

I had an old 40Gb SSD in a box that had a 2mm shim screwed to the top, so I used that as a spacer for the 7mm SSD.

Reassembled everything, prayed to the blood god (computers are not complete without a blood sacrifice, and I managed to reopen my cut finger during the process).

Plugged in the power supply, and it powered up.

It did not, however, boot... of course. Blank SSD.

That was when I ran into the next problem.

Now I need to get an operating system onto it.

I'll just make a bootable USB from the Mac OS X Lion installer, right?

I've done it many times before.

I'm a packrat (not a hoarder, you wash your dirty mouth).

I've kept almost all of the installers for Mac OSX / macOS on a backup drive.

I'm missing Mavericks, but... is anyone *really* missing Mavericks?

The Mac mini of doom (faulty graphics card, self-reboots frequently) is running High Sierra. The MBP & White Macbook are running Catalina.

There's not a Mac in this house that will create a Lion installer USB.

The only one that could have done so now has a blank SSD installed.

In hindsight, I should have tried to create the USB installer *before* I needed it, not after.

Didn't matter what I tried, macOS Catalina is *all* 64-bit, and there was no way to hack around it and create the installer.

Plan B: Install Snow Leopard from DVD, then install Lion.

Dig out the installation media. Installation took time, but succeeded. Copy Lion installer to Macbook.

"This installer needs Mac OS X 10.6.6, and you have 10.6.3"

/sigh.

Run software update and INSTALL ALL THE UPDATES.

Wait for a while, finally done.

Let's do this!

Or, let's not.

New roadblock, and this one was a doozy.

"This copy of the Install Mac OS X Lion application can’t be verified. It may have been corrupted or tampered with during downloading"

So, fun fact: macOS updates are now free.

Mac OS X Lion was not.

Lion was the first time that Apple distributed Mac OS X through the app store. Every trick that I tried refused to show me a download link for it. Later installers are easily available.

Lion is not. I could pay Apple ~AUD$30 for the installation media and wait, but... no.

Off to the Googles. Tired & getting desperate, I even considered going down particular rabbit holes I'd long since abandoned (I pay for my entertainment now, thankyouverymuch).

Then I came across this link from @TidBITS, and the magic happened... https://tidbits.com/2019/10/28/redownload-archived-macos-installers-to-address-expired-certificates/

In short, the security certificate in the installer was expired. Unplugged the Ethernet, jumped into Terminal and reset the date to before the expiry date, and away it went.

The rest was a doddle. It ran up perfectly, reconnected it to the network, updated to Lion 10.7.5.

This 13 year old Macbook, with 2Gb of RAM and a 120Gb SSD is *surprisingly* snappy.

It's not going to win any races, and to be honest, I'm not sure what I can actually use it for, but it runs. It can browse the web (although the browsers are all out of date).

There is, however, one quirk that I can't fix. It's convinced that the Option key is being held down when it boots, and it shows the boot menu every single time... unless I actually hold down the Option key.

I also can't zap the NVRAM, again I assume, because of the Option key.

Anyway, there you have it. Probably should have been a blog post, but I hope that you muted the thread instead of me, if this wasn't of interest to you. ;)

#talknerdytome