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xplocvo

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 27, 2009
30
0
I inherited an old Mac Mini that had a failing hard drive. It supports up to OS X Lion, so I purchased a license for Lion via the Apple Store. I was hoping to take the download and make a USB stick out of it in order to install on the new hard drive I put in. I added that to my Mac App Store account, but when I attempt to download it from my Macs running Yosemite, I get an error that it can't be installed on this Mac. Does anyone know of some backdoor method to download the setup file from a Mac running OS X later than the one I'm trying to download?
 

Weaselboy

Moderator
Staff member
Jan 23, 2005
34,137
15,602
California
I inherited an old Mac Mini that had a failing hard drive. It supports up to OS X Lion, so I purchased a license for Lion via the Apple Store. I was hoping to take the download and make a USB stick out of it in order to install on the new hard drive I put in. I added that to my Mac App Store account, but when I attempt to download it from my Macs running Yosemite, I get an error that it can't be installed on this Mac. Does anyone know of some backdoor method to download the setup file from a Mac running OS X later than the one I'm trying to download?

Nope... won't work. It will not let you DL an OS version from the App Store that will not run on that machine.

What year is the Mini? If it is on this list, you may be able to get the OS on there with a command-option-r (all three keys at once) boot to Internet recovery.
 

xplocvo

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 27, 2009
30
0
Nope... won't work. It will not let you DL an OS version from the App Store that will not run on that machine.

What year is the Mini? If it is on this list, you may be able to get the OS on there with a command-option-r (all three keys at once) boot to Internet recovery.

Thanks for the link, it's a mid-2007 Mini though. Fortunately I was able to find a Mac at work this morning still running 10.6 so I'm downloading it from there.
 
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