Some of you have the new Mini in your hands and probably have a backup clone disk of your Snow Leopard OS. Does your new Mini boot off the external SL disk?
THanks!
Some of you have the new Mini in your hands and probably have a backup clone disk of your Snow Leopard OS. Does your new Mini boot off the external SL disk?
THanks!
How To Create An Universal Boot DVD
Make sure you have the following software:
- Xcode Tools installed (for xar support)
- BBEdit or TextWrangler
- Pacifist
Create a read/write copy of your installation DVD with Disk Utility or hdiutil! Now eject the real DVD and mount the read/write disk image of your installation DVD! The order of the steps is important.
Open a new Terminal window and make sure you have root privileges via:
sudo -s
Create two directories on your startup disk with:
mkdir /bootstuff/
mkdir /finalbootstuff/
Change the current working directory with:
cd /bootstuff/
Copy the OSInstall.mpkg to the "bootstuff" subfolder on your startup disk with:
ditto /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ DVD/System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg /bootstuff/OSInstall.mpkg
Decompress with:
xar -xvf OSInstall.mpkg
Open the "Distribution" file with a plain text editor (BBEdit or TextWrangler for example) and find the function "installCheckScript" and let it return "true" at the beginning of the function (use other functions in the script as an example)! Save your work!
Remove the no longer needed "OSInstall.mpkg" from the "bootstuff" folder:
rm -rfv /bootstuff/OSInstall.mpkg
Recompress it with:
xar -cvf /finalbootstuff/OSInstall.mpkg ./
If you followed this guide you can see with Pacifist, that the recompressed package has the exact same structure as the original package. This is important! Otherwise the installer would not be able to use the recompressed package.
Delete the old OSInstall.mpkg with:
rm -rfv /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ DVD/System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg
Copy the new OSInstall.mpkg to the Mac OS X Installation DVD with:
ditto /finalbootstuff/OSInstall.mpkg /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ DVD/System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg
Eject the Mac OS X installation DVD with:
hdiutil detach -force /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ DVD/
You can now burn the modified disk image to a new DL-DVD, or you can "restore" the DVD-contents to a GPT-formatted flash memory disk.
instead ofxar -cvf /finalbootstuff/OSInstall.mpkg *
xar -cvf /finalbootstuff/OSInstall.mpkg ./
You cant boot an older copy of OSX than what was shipped with the unit.
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.
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?
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!
No, they can't.Does your new Mini boot off the external SL disk?