Updating to macOS Catalina was the most painful macOS update ever. I did not expect that as I am working with various beta versions of macOS Catalina on another machine without having any issues. I will describe the problems I faced and how I solved them. Maybe this can help others facing planning to update their systems.
I have a Mac Pro (2013) with two 23-inch monitors attached in portrait mode. Retrospectively this was probably the main issue.
While running the update the screens turned black after a few minutes. I assume that the update was still running when I decided to reboot the machine. After rebooting the update continued, but the monitors turned black again. So I left the computer alone. After an hour or so the update was finished. Everything seemed to be okay.
But I found files on my hard disk obviously from a previous macOS version, which could not be deleted -- even with administrator privileges. It turned out that the macOS System Integrity Protection (SIP) mechanism did not allow me to do so. The solution is rebooting in Recovery Mode and delete the files in the Terminal. Most Internet posts recommended to temporarily disable SIP (sudo csrutil disable), but this was not necessary on my system. But starting in Recovery Mode was a problem I had never faced before. After some time my screens turned black again. No chance to open a Terminal window. I finally detached the two portrait monitors and attached one landscape monitor. This worked. Very weird! Maybe it was the second monitor and it would have worked with a single portrait monitor as well.
After rebooting normally I got a message that my SoftRAID driver needs to be updated (although the latest version was already installed). I use SoftRAID for an external SSD. Although officially not supported (at least according to a relatively current thread in the SoftRAID forum), it worked beautifully after updating to (or re-installing) the lastest version (5.7.5).
Touch-Base drivers: The touch functionality stopped working. I un-installed the current drivers and re-installed them. After a re-configuration the touch functionality was back again. However, for some reason I have to boot my computer twice. After the first boot the driver recognizes the monitors, but the status is "Not okay". After rebooting everything is fine. I already contacted Dave Bhattacharjee from Touch-Base. He usually provides me an updated driver within few hours.
Last but not least: HASP driver. I had already updated to the latest 64-bit driver (v7.100) before updating to macOS Catalina. This driver worked after the update to macOS Catalina out of the box.
Finally and most importantly, Hauptwerk 4.2.1 works without any issues.
In summary, Hauptwerk 4.2.1 works great on macOS Catalina 10.15. However, if you plan to update your system issues may arise from third-party drivers.
With best wishes,
Chris