No disc restore on a Mac Mini (M9686LL/B). Possible?

No-boot situation where I either try to boot normally and see this screen:


..or hold Option+Shift and get this:


Only natural that I'd find myself in this predicament with no form of restore discs... I have a couple 10.5/10.5.8 dmgs laying around, and even hunted down a firewire so I could possibly see about restoring from an external hard drive.


Anything I can do short of purchasing a $160 disc for a Mac I only paid $80 for?

I've gotten into Open Firmware a couple times but couldn't find anything useful. Is that the key to getting this damn thing to boot from firewire when the OS is acting up?

Ignoring the other chunk of unhelpful uselessness...

Knoodles said:

So which is it?

Click to expand...

Mac Mini PPC G4 (M9686LL/B) '05 instead of '09

SOLVED.

I had to grab a backup of 10.4 Tiger and burn it with TransMac.

Firewire mode didn't really ever get me anywhere because it requires a second Mac, but turns out Open Firmware was just what I needed to force it to boot from the CD when other boot commands didn't work.

I found a few variations of CD boot commands to use from Open Firmware, but the one that ultimately worked was:

boot cd:,\\:tbxi

Took about an hour, but after that my Mac was back up and running! Next thing on the list was to get it to 10.5.8. My Mac previously didn't want to read the dual layer DVDs I bought for my 10.5.8 dmg, so I ripped the drive out of one of my PCs to do the trick. DiskUtil seemed to create everything just fine yet it continuously spat the disc back out when I'd use my Mac's disc reader. Through something I can only describe as luck, my Mac just up and started reading the dual-layer DVD that it wouldn't before.



...I'm now happily running 10.5.8 on my maxed out Mac Mini. Got a functional alternative to iFunBox for my iPhone, the xCode suite installed without a hitch, got the version of iTunes I need for my iPhone and iTunes to shake hands (10.4's maximum iTunes didn't like it) and everything is going swell.

It's an extremely fulfilling feeling