Mindless

MacBook A1398 Mid 2014 Battery Change

This is the Laptop I’ve received.

plain pic of macbook

Notice the preggers battery

preggers batter

First gonna wipe down the outside. Here Is the battery I purchased amazon link, and there’s the rag I wiped it down with. It came with the screwdrivers, time to check if they fit, then remove the bottom if they do.

dirtyrag and battery

Arrange your screws, don’t want too long screw, as Louis would say. The blue driver fit, Ewww dirty.

arranged screws

dirty insides

The green fit the internal screws for the battery removed the service sticker >~< Pulled up and towards me to disconnect the cable.

breaking service warranty

plug pulled

Removing with a plastic spatula haha… it's working.

spatula time

Successfully removed, took a little force, but worked in the end

Now I'm gonna wipe down the inside a little for this dust, not gonna go nuts

Here it is, now to put in the new battery.

battery-less

It took a lot of force to get it in.. and the ribbon end is a little long, hopefully, the connector is fine, gonna not glue it down, the case and screws should hold it

new battery

And don’t forget to get the inner screws first as I did

Screws all replaced, now for the moment of truth…

battery

… Gave me a low battery message right off the bat, it told me to install and then drain to 10 % hmmm…

battery error

So opening back up to check the connector

So the connector was all fucked up, and the connections for the pins bent… I had to pry them back open with a screwdriver oi vey, so it's holding a charge

battery status

So for the calibration steps, I am going to stay using macOS, need to discharge to 10%, and charge 5 times Use caffeinate command to keep it awake for the discharging process

Making a MacBook A1398 Useful

Well, macOS is dropping intel support. So let's make this machine useful. I will be installing Windows, and Linux, and maintaining a small macOS drive simply for firmware and blessing, and possibly nostalgia in 20 years from now. The disk size is 1TB.

First I downloaded a Windows 10 ISO and then opened up boot camp.

Selected the first options and inserted a USB drive, setting the windows partition size to whatever you think is best.

Installation proceeded uneventfully, cant connect to the internet during installation, and Bootcamp installation ran after the first login.

Reboot into macOS, add partition size of whatever you want to dedicate to Linux(this is mostly to safely resize/add partition), leaving a 100GB partition left for macOS is what I did. This rest will be used for a linux installation.

Go to arch site and grab the install CD https://archlinux.org/download/

Insert your USB stick, find the necessary device name using:

sudo diskutil list

Then unmount the disk or else dd will complain:

sudo diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk8

Then get to dd-ing

sudo dd if=/Users/anon/Downloads/archlinux-2022.05.01-x86_64.iso of=/dev/disk8 bs=4M

Note , disk8 is my disk, yours will likely be different

Restart and hold down option, choose your disk - efi boot will probably be its name, with a yellow external disk casing look.

Your main issue is gonna be getting an initial internet connection, I have a dongle that will hopefully work. It worked, I used a panda wireless device, connected to network using iwctl

I deleted the partition we made to shrink the apfs container, added a 1GB ext4 partition, ended up as part number 2. I did not create an ESP/EFI partition, but rather used the one I have been using throughout the earlier steps.

Then used the rest for btrfs, this is for multiple reasons, 16 GB ram being one, and if I need swap, btrfs now supports swap pages.

Encrypt and Create parts

    cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sda5
    cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda5 cryptroot  

    mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2
    mkfs.btrfs /dev/mapper/cryptroot
    
    mount -o noatime,discard,ssd,defaults /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt
    
    cd /mnt
    btrfs subvolume create __active
    btrfs subvolume create __active/rootvol
    btrfs subvolume create __active/home
    btrfs subvolume create __active/var
    btrfs subvolume create __snapshots
    btrfs subvolume create __snapshots/root
    btrfs subvolume create __snapshots/home
    btrfs subvolume create __snapshots/var
    cd 
    umount /mnt

Mount all volumes for install

    mount -o noatime,discard,ssd,defaults,subvol=__active/rootvol /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt
    mkdir /mnt/.snapshots
    mount -o noatime,discard,ssd,defaults,subvol=__snapshots/root /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt/.snapshots
    mkdir /mnt/{home,var,boot}
    mount -o noatime,discard,ssd,defaults,subvol=__active/home /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt/home
    mount -o noatime,discard,ssd,defaults,subvol=__active/var /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt/var
    mkdir /mnt/home/.snapshots
    mkdir /mnt/var/.snapshots
    mount -o noatime,discard,ssd,defaults,subvol=__snapshots/home /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt/home/.snapshots
    mount -o noatime,discard,ssd,defaults,subvol=__snapshots/var /dev/mapper/cryptroot /mnt/var/.snapshots
    sync
     
    mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/boot
    mkdir /mnt/boot/efi
    mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot/efi
    sync

For my pacstrap I picked the following:

pacstrap /mnt base base-devel linux linux-firmware nano btrfs-progs efibootmgr grub broadcom-wl netctl wpa_supplicant dhclient dialog mesa refind

For modules to load,dm_crypt, wl(Broadcom) as well as nouveau(this will also work out for the OPTIMUS switching better than loading i915), for HOOKS add encrypt after block

Install grub:

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --recheck

Set default grub config(edit /etc/default/grub):

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="cryptdevice=/dev/sda5:cryptroot root=/dev/mapper/cryptroot rootflags=subvol=__active/rootvol quiet"

Generate config:

    grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
    grub-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/arch/grub.cfg

Then to top off everything making the systems functionality just easier for all the OS’s I ran refind-install

You should now have an autistic triple boot system

Addition notes: