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So does the 2011 Mini boot Snow Leopard?
- Thread starter Minicube
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The grey DVD from Early-2011 mobile Macs (MacBook Pro) should work, if you eliminate the machine specific check in OSInstall.mpkg. This disc contains Thunderbolt drivers and other required drivers for your Mac mini.
This is my way, how i remove the machine specific check (this guide can contain omissions):
Special note:
I'm sure you can use
instead of
Thats not entirely true. Have booted up tiger on my 2010 mini a few times from a backed up hard drive I made before selling my 2006 imac. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt.
Sad, I hate that Apple does this. In the corporate world you have to get all your machines running the same OS, and there may be testing procedures, paperwork, ect. This means we can't buy any minis for a while.
They did not tell us, which version of SL they did try. For example, 10.6.8 for a 2010-Mac is not the same OS as 10.6.8 for a Early-2011-Mac. The Mac mini contains MacBook Pro parts, so i think a modified Early-2011 MBP installation DVD ("restored" to a USB flash drive) should work.
Just give it time for someone to figure it out. Presume you would take a SL install from an external drive, change some settings, then boot it from a 2011 mini.
Thanks for the info, guys. (Retro, your instructions look promising; let us know if they do work for the new Mini). It looks like there may be a chance of it working in the future, but it's not booting out of the box. No new Mini for me until it does... ;-(
I have a snow leopard upgrade disc that will load snow leopard 10.6 I think if I play around with this it may work.
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I have succeeded in loading 10.6.7 on the new July 2011 MacMini Server using the install disc for the 2011 MacbookPro 15" (i7 quad-core with the intel3000 video drivers). It does work and I have 100% verification.
It was simple actually, just loaded an SSD into an enclosure, connected it to the Macbook, installed the system on the drive, removed the drive from the enclosure and installed it into the MacMiniServer and done. The installation was the only tricky part... tight little box!
That said, it's running smooth. Fast as hell. Something is not right though. Cursor seems to get visually stuck. It looks like a non-spinning beach ball most of the time, but it's not processing anything. Works normally, just the cursor image displayed seems to get tripped up or something. That's the only anomaly I've noticed so far. Wonder if that can be fixed?
It was simple actually, just loaded an SSD into an enclosure, connected it to the Macbook, installed the system on the drive, removed the drive from the enclosure and installed it into the MacMiniServer and done. The installation was the only tricky part... tight little box!
That said, it's running smooth. Fast as hell. Something is not right though. Cursor seems to get visually stuck. It looks like a non-spinning beach ball most of the time, but it's not processing anything. Works normally, just the cursor image displayed seems to get tripped up or something. That's the only anomaly I've noticed so far. Wonder if that can be fixed?
This is GREAT news! I'm wondering if that same MBP disk (which I have) would work for the base model mini? That cursor issue must be irritating, but there should be a fix for that...
I'm sure that the base models will work fine. I was more concerned about the server actually because of the ordeal that I had to go through installing SL on last year's SL MiniServer.
On the cursor issue, this may have been due to the processor being overloaded by spotlight/itunes indexing and that sort of thing, because it seems to have gone away.
Rock solid man. I'd say jump in!
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I'm sure that the base models will work fine. I was more concerned about the server actually because of the ordeal that I had to go through installing SL on last year's SL MiniServer.
On the cursor issue, this may have been due to the processor being overloaded by spotlight/itunes indexing and that sort of thing, because it seems to have gone away.
Rock solid man. I'd say jump in!
Thanks for your test! I will buy a new Mac mini as soon as possible.
So I jumped in, and here is what I found.
I have the base 2.3 i5 model with 2 gigs of RAM.
When I tried booting from my old Mini (C2D 2.0--in headless Target Disk mode) running Snow Leopard the screen went black during the boot process IF I HAD THE DISPLAY HOOKED TO THE THUNDERBOLT PORT. When I switched to the HDMI port, the screen went black for a second, BUT THEN IT BOOTED NORMALLY! That's the good news, the bad news is that the cursor turns into a non-spinning beach ball as someone mentioned above. Can't seem to get that to go away. I'm thinking maybe more RAM, or running Disk Utilities once I get SL on the actual Mini drive might help.
Also, the system seems very slow, no doubt due to the 2 gigs of RAM (I have 8 on order). Not a good idea for Apple to ship with 2 gigs, IMO.
Anyway, I cloned the (virgin) Lion OS to an external drive, and will now partition the Mini drive into 2 parts, one for Lion and one for Snow Leopard. Then I will clone Lion back, and clone my old Mini Snow Leopard to the other partition. I hope to end up with a dual booting 2011 Mini.
I have the base 2.3 i5 model with 2 gigs of RAM.
When I tried booting from my old Mini (C2D 2.0--in headless Target Disk mode) running Snow Leopard the screen went black during the boot process IF I HAD THE DISPLAY HOOKED TO THE THUNDERBOLT PORT. When I switched to the HDMI port, the screen went black for a second, BUT THEN IT BOOTED NORMALLY! That's the good news, the bad news is that the cursor turns into a non-spinning beach ball as someone mentioned above. Can't seem to get that to go away. I'm thinking maybe more RAM, or running Disk Utilities once I get SL on the actual Mini drive might help.
Also, the system seems very slow, no doubt due to the 2 gigs of RAM (I have 8 on order). Not a good idea for Apple to ship with 2 gigs, IMO.
Anyway, I cloned the (virgin) Lion OS to an external drive, and will now partition the Mini drive into 2 parts, one for Lion and one for Snow Leopard. Then I will clone Lion back, and clone my old Mini Snow Leopard to the other partition. I hope to end up with a dual booting 2011 Mini.
TA, did you not read the above post? I DID boot from my 2009 mini drive in Target Disk mode (there is another post above about it working from a MBP install disk). Aside from the cursor issue, the system seemed solid. Unfortunately, when I cloned my 2009 mini drive to a partition on the 2011 mini drive, it wouldn't work (gray screen gear spun forever). Makes no sense that it would boot externally, but not from the home drive. Obviously, some more testing/work needs to be done.
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I imagine the cursor issues are related to the lion prepped firmware in the mini. Is your mouse Bluetooth? It could also be a driver incompatibility between the new Bluetooth tech introduced in the new macs.
I imagine the cursor issues are related to the lion prepped firmware in the mini. Is your mouse Bluetooth? It could also be a driver incompatibility between the new Bluetooth tech introduced in the new macs.