I Did a Surgery on my Macbook Air Again... and Succeeded?
	2025 May 26
	Current Mood:	I'm not sad anymore! For now!
	Now Playing:	"Frontier Syndrome" by Jiikae

The very next day after I published my previous post I was back in the Macintosh mines, because I just couldn't let it go. I paid a considerable sum for that SSD and just didn't want to give up, so I went back to the list of things that I needed to do to make the SSD work from the previously mentioned huge forum thread, and started searching again.

First of all, I discovered that I was quite foolish for sticking with High Sierra all those years, because it turned out that it was the next one — Mojave — that was actually the last macOS version to support 32-bit software. That was an easy step: I just upgraded my OS and, luckily, there was no significant difference between the two versions. Now I was ready to do more stuff on the list again! Like finally updating the firmware maybe??

After some time, thanks to this forum thread I've figured out how to update my Macbook firmware without actually upgrading my OS to the last supported version (Big Sur). This particular macOS iteration (Big Sur) apparently introduced all the needed code for the firmware to correctly recognize NVMe SSD cards by old Macbook Air laptops, and, supposedly, this latest possible firmware version should have fixed kernel panic crashes on exiting the hibernation mode.

One small interesting moment: unlike the previous macOS versions, I couldn't just download the OS installer from the AppStore — at this point the upgrade was only possible via the Software Update window in the System Preferences. Luckily, OpenCore's "Create macOS Installer" feature allowed for grabbing the Big Sur installer, but only if you knew that it was in the hidden "Older/Beta Versions" section.

Following the tutorial I was able to update my firmware, yay! I was so excited to try the new SSD again! I just had to make another Time Machine backup and I was ready to go!

...

The Time Machine backup failed after reaching approximately 30GB. And then it failed again after reaching approximately 20GB. And then it failed during the preparation stage. And then it failed again. And again. And again. And then I discovered this big forum thread on the official Apple Support website. Apparently, a lot of folks who upgraded their systems to Mojave couldn't use Time Machine properly after that? Well, guess what — another thread for me to read and try out everything people suggest that will definitely consume a whole day. And, in the end, I was luckier than a lot of those forum users: turned out, I just forgot to delete the Big Sur installer, and it was too big and had so many files inside of it (I guess) that it couldn't be backed up by Time Machine?? The backup went smoothly after I deleted it, and that was all that mattered! Yay!

I replaced the SSD, recovered the OS, activated the Sleep Mode, exited the Sleep Mode, and...

...my laptop crashed again by throwing kernel panic.

But hey! I had Mojave now, which meant that now I could finally use the NVMeFix + Lilu extensions, and maybe even the SsdPmEnabler one if I feel adventurous desperate enough. I installed all three of those extensions at once with Hackintool (a tool for Hackintosh machines), and... hardlocked my system, causing kernel panics on system startup.

I restored the system again with my backup, installed only NVMeFix + Lilu, and this time I was able to load into the system again after the restart. Yay! But, unfortunately, it didn't help me fix the hibernation crash.

When I wrote about this whole journey to the eBay seller asking them if I could refund the SSD, they answered:

I couldn't. That was the whole point of a successful SSD installation — to have every other laptop feature intact.

They were cool enough though with allowing me to refund the SSD, and now it's on its way to the UK and I hope I will get some of my money back. Fingers crossed :)

FULLMETAL SURGERY
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FULLMETAL SURGERY

Barely a day after my second failed attempt to replace an SSD in my old Macbook Air in the same aforementioned huge forum thread I saw several mentions of a specific SSD card that people were recommending specifically for Macbook Air late 2013 - early 2015: Fanxiang AP2000Pro PCIe3*4 NVMe M.2 SSD For Mac. It was cheaper than the one I got on eBay and it didn't have an adapter — all in one piece like the real thing! I had to try it out because I still couldn't let it go after all those days of failures, so I ordered one from AliExpress and then had to wait for about 3 weeks for it to arrive.

When it was finally time to test it out, I had to make another backup with Time Machine, and this time it was successful on the first try. Phew! I replaced the SSD, restored the system and everything just worked.

It was a triumph +__+

Now I had 1TB of space with just 220GB used, and I was ready to proceed with the next BIG STEP — installing Linux Mint as a dual-boot.

Now, this shouldn't be difficult, right? They have such a nice tutorial on how to do that, and the installer would see that I already have macOS installed and would partition my disk drive automatically, and the GRUB menu would show both options on start, and I could do so much more cool stuff on my old laptop, and I would be the happiest dual-boot Macbook Air user ever... *o*

...

Well, first of all, I've spent a couple hours trying to figure out which version of the suggested image flasher Etcher could run on Mojave without crashing. Yeah, I was downloading each big new number release and was installing each of them, like a fool. Gladly, there was one kind person on the Internet who wrote exactly which version was the last one supported on Mojave.

Now I had a bootable USB stick with the latest Linux Mint Cinnamon version on it. I booted it up, opened the installer... and it couldn't recognize my macOS.

Then I followed a couple of more complicated tutorials that, in their sum, taught me how to create disk partitions manually in order to use them for the Linux installation. I followed the steps... AND I MADE IT (Parkour Civilization joke)

I finally had Linux Mint running on my Macbook Air! It didn't show me the GRUB menu at the start for some reason, but that's okay — one of the tutorials taught me how to add a menu option manually in the grub configuration file. Also, for some reason, the menu was hidden by default. Hmm. And now when I choose my self-made option in the grub menu it shows me an error that it can't load the disk partition my macOS is located in. Hmm. I still could access the macOS volume by holding Option (Alt) button when turning the laptop on, but that's not what I expected and I wanted to fix that somehow.

Well, turned out, it wasn't possible at all. My macOS volume was formatted as the APFS type, which Linux systems have no way of recognizing, so grub just thinks that there's no other system installed on the SSD. That is also the reason why the Linux Mint installer didn't offer me to do the automatic dual-boot installation.

Whatever. I still had the two systems I wanted on my laptop, so it was time to connect them somehow. What about creating another partition that could be recognized by both systems and use it as a Share folder or even as s shared Documents folder? That would be cool! And I could probably just format it as the exFAT type, like I did with some of my USB sticks? Nice!

Thinking that, I opened Disk Utility on macOS, created a new partition, just like I did for the Linux installation, but this time in the exFAT format. It started the process, but at some point Disk Utility just CRASHED. When I opened it again I saw that my macOS volume was now detached and "Unknown" and everything else on the SSD was basically locked out. I knew that after restarting my laptop I wouldn't be able to see the macOS volume anymore, and that's exactly what happened on restart. It was a bad fuckup, so I had nothing else to do but to format the whole SSD again, restore my macOS again from the Time Machine backup, and install Linux Mint AGAIN.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!

I did all that right after the disk failure, it took me some more hours, but by night I had both systems running again. This time I decided to use an external SSD to transfer files from one system to another, and just accepted my fate.

One nice thing I did though was not enabling the grub menu again, but making the Macbook's Startup Manager load automatically on each start without the need to hold the button, using this Terminal command:

sudo nvram manufacturing-enter-picker=true

I'm getting used to Linux Mint more and more with all the different customisation choices available, but having to solve each new small problem every time I'm trying to do something new in it feels very exhausting, gotta be honest. But then again, I've spent the last 4 years trying to survive in this unstoppable stream of constantly updating software on my old High Sierra system, so constant computer problem solving is something I'm used to. ^-^

Now, can anyone please help me get fonts on Cinnamon to be as crispy as on macOS? >__>