Hello @Flashman in my case it have a NVidia GForce 9400 256Mb, and it runs Blocs very smooth… no delays. Even the preview is very fast, I will do a video for you to check…
Thanks Pealco, it doesn’t seem to be split, just damaged, but I’m going to give your suggestion a go anyway and see what happens.
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Thanks @Pealco, I tried that several ways. Then I read somewhere, I was doing it right the first time using GUID. Sad to report it still did not work. 
I decided to connect a hard drive, instead of a USB thumb drive, and it Worked! I’m now running MacOS Catalina 10.15.4! I’m so excited! First thing install the new Blocs 3 and see how it works.
I appreciate everyone’s patients. 
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Hello Pealco and gang,
Reporting my Mac Mini 2009 is up and running Catalina!
On the first launch, the spinning ball was never-ending, but after a restart it is now up and running. I use this little guy as the server for entertainment at home, connected to an external HD containing all my music and movies. Considering it has only 3Gb RAM (haven’t been able to make the other memory dimm be recognized, don’t know why), it is running fairly at the same speed it was before with ElCapi. Big pros are that Itunes, AppleTV and Photos have been updated to current versions and running fine.
If something explodes or anything I’ll let you know.
Cheers,
Alberto
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Hi again @Pealco, just an update.
It wasn’t the split drive, so I’ve had to reformat.
Added Mojave, upgraded now to Catalina, and now copying the files back over from my SuperDuper backup disc
It’s saying 72 hrs! But hopefully it’ll all be ok in the end.
Thanks for the suggestions. T
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So for now:
@pealco - MacBook 5,1 (2008) - Catalina OK
@centurion_basso - Macmini5,1; Macmini5,2 ?!?!? (2011) - Catalina OK
@KBConcepts - MacBook Pro 5,4 (2009) - Catalina OK
@TrevReav - iMac14,4 ; iMac15,1 ?!?!?!? (2014) - Catalina ??? (finishing Installation)
So far so good…
Sorry sorry! Macmini 2009 3,1. Catalina working as we speak.
So for now:
@pealco - MacBook 5,1 (2008) - Catalina OK
@centurion_basso - Macmini3,1 (2009) - Catalina OK
@KBConcepts - MacBook Pro 5,4 (2009) - Catalina OK
@TrevReav - iMac14,4 ; iMac15,1 ?!?!?!? (2014) - Catalina ??? (finishing Installation)
So far so good…
A few weeks ago I finally decided that my MacBook Pro (mid2012) couldn’t hold up to my work speed… After I woke up from the shock I got from the prices of the new MacBook Pro’s, I went to the store; got myself a 1TB SSD and 2 slices of 8G Ram… A small investment and my MBP feels like reborn. And all of a sudden my random crashes with Blocs (at saving a project) are gone…
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Great, I am installing it on a 2010 Mac mini I had siting around here right now!
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@Mattheus An awful lot of general stability issues and spinning ball suddenly go away if you have a fast drive and adequate Ram. For many purposes the processor is not the real roadblock.
The real fly in the ointment is that you never know when something major like the logic board will go wrong on an old machine, so you have to balance these decisions and decide how much you are willing to spend on an old machine. My daughter had a brand new MacBook Pro where the logic board died without warning after 3 months!
In my case I bought 32 gigs of ram for my Mac Pro when it was new, but even 5 years ago I was becoming desperate with the lack of speed on some tasks, so buying a 256gb SSD completely transformed the machine and the best money I’ve ever spent on a computer.
Later on I also bought a faster graphics card, which enabled me to install Mojave and basically buy another year or two of useful life, but I think I am reaching the end in terms of spending money on this computer. It’s wonderful being able to use these old machines, but we should all keep an eye on online security as well and think about how they are used. Anybody running El Capitan online is asking for trouble.
The good thing about an SSD drive is that you can almost certainly use it in other ways at a later date, whereas Ram is limited to your specific computer and on some models it can be really expensive.
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Just waiting for it to finish installing.
You know how hard it is to find a USB stick I can format lol
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I have a few, and all of my USB3 have stuff I can’t delete, so I end in a USB1 and take me ages to make all operation… but was my fault…
By the way I use SARDU a lot to fix my clients computers, I don’t know if you use it, but they have their pro licenses with 50% discount…
No I haven’t used SARDU before.
Well I had 6 minutes remaining then it dropped to 5 minutes after about 4 mins LOL
In my installation, I don’t know if was Corona fault 
or the delay installation, I get myself putting my finger in the screen to check if the bar is going up or if it was stopped…
USB1 is not the right choice…
lol, yeah I did that with mouse pointer when the installer patch was running. The log looked like it was stuck in a loop (it was obviously very busy though) . It eventually continued.
3 mins now.
My external keyboard is connected to the Mac mini, and I keep trying to type on it for my MacBook… dang!
I actually don’t do any/many repairs or rebuilds these days, I have a friend that I outsource that too.
So I am just going through the setup process now. Its way smoother than High-Sierra (which was rather laggy on this Mac mini)
By the way I found one issue, and I don’t know if was only me that some software that asks for camera and microphone or Screen Recording, says that they need authorization from the Catalina, but every software that is not downloaded from App Store don’t popup the question to download…
So if you are one of the cases I found a solution, it won’t work in normal installations as you have to turn off System Integrity Protection. But in this installations you have this SIP costumed deselected by default to make Catalina works…
So for that if you have to authorize camera or microfone or screen recording to a specific app you do like this:
Open Terminal and type (This is for Google Chrome example):
cat /A(if you press the tab key it will fill the rest for you)plications/G(tab)oogle\(space)Chrome.app/C(tab)intents/I(tab)nfo.plist
cat /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/Info.plist
Then you look for:
<key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
And after this line you will find:
<string>com.google.Chrome</string>
So you record this “com.google.Chrome”
So now that we have the identifier for the application we need to allow Chrome, so lets do it mannually:
- To activate Microphone you have to run this code in terminal:
sudo sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db “INSERT or REPLACE INTO access VALUES('kTCCServiceMicrophone’,’com.google.Chrome’,0,1,1,NULL,NULL,NULL,‘UNUSED’,NULL,0,1551892126);”
- To activate Camera you have to run this code in terminal:
sudo sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db “INSERT or REPLACE INTO access VALUES(‘kTCCServiceCamera’,‘com.google.Chrome’,0,1,1,NULL,NULL,NULL,‘UNUSED’,NULL,0,1551892126);”
- To activate Screen Recording you have to run this code in terminal:
sudo sqlite3 “/Library/Application Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db” ‘insert into access values (“kTCCServiceScreenCapture”, “com.google.Chrome”, 0, 1, 1, “”, “”, “”, “UNUSED”, “”, 0,1565595574)’
Hope it helps anyone with this problem…
(If you have a different software with this issue you just take the first step and change to see the plist in that software. Then in the codes change com.google.Chrome to the key you find in the plist in the correct string)
If you want to do this in normal installations you have to startup you computer with the key OPTION pressed, go to reinstall boot OS, and in utilities open terminal in there and type csrutil disable then restart normally your computer and add the specific app like the explanation above, when you finish restart OS again with OPTION pressed, go to reinstall boot OS, and in utilities open terminal in there and type csrutil enable then restart normally.
And voila…