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Installing Tiger on Intel Mac Minis (OEM partition needed?)

cellularmitosis

cellularmitosis

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 6, 2010
152
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I know, technically this isn't a PowerPC machine, but I figure all of the Apple retrocomputing knowledge is in this subforum :)

As part of (eventually) trying to port Golang to PowerPC Macs, an incremental step would be porting their existing Darwin/x86 support back from Snow Leopard to Leopard and Tiger.

Because of this, I've just acquired a 32-bit and 64-bit first-gen Mac Minis.

And I'm having a heck of a time getting these machines to boot from any Intel Tiger disc I throw at them.

Leopard and Snow Leopard install just fine, but Tiger in particular seems troublesome.

It seems Apple only started adding Intel support to the Tiger discs after 10.4.6. But even the 10.4.6 and 10.4.7 discs I've tried don't work.

(Specifically, they will show up in the alt boot menu, and you can start the boot process, you'll see the grey apple and spinner, but after about a minute the grey apple just turns into a grey no-entry symbol and it seems to just spin forever. Again, Leopard and Snow Leopard install just fine, so there isn't a problem with the hardware or discs).

But then I came across this post: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mac-mini-tiger-install-disc-wont-boot.762000/

Found out it was partition related that's causing the disc not to boot past the Apple splash screen. I accidentally deleted the hidden OEM partition when messing with partitions (and this is what makes the grey discs ability to boot into the installer). I went to an Apple authorised service provider near my area and they tested a retail copy of the Mac Box Set of Snow Leopard and it booted into it fine - purchased Snow Leopard Mac Box Set yesterday, installed perfectly :). If you have Tiger or don't have leopard currently installed, you need to purchase the Mac Box Set of Snow Leopard at approximately £129/$169.
Click to expand...

So now I'm wondering if some of the disc images I have are actually grey discs, and if I need this magical hidden OEM partition for them to work correctly?

Anyone have any experience with this? This post seems to be the only post on the internet which mentions this magical OEM partition theory.
 
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OEM partition? I don't think so. There's an EFI partition but it's not used for booting Mac OS X. Mac OS X boots directly from an HFS+ partition. You can use Disk Utility.app to restore an installer volume to a partition of the Mac mini (connected with target disk mode) or an external Fire Wire drive.

I used an iMac to get 10.4 on my MacPro3,1. Maybe you can just patch the installer though.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/the-tiger-thread-mac-os-x-10-4.2134451/post-30121861

Or maybe you don't need a patch. Depends on the disk. Here's another:
https://archive.org/details/MacOSX10.4.10-Mac-2Z691-6089-A_2Z691-6113-A

And some other suggestions:
https://macintoshgarden.org/forum/help-i-need-104-work-my-2006-mac-mini

Maybe you already tried those? Besides Internet Archive and Macintosh Garden there's also Macintosh Repository.
 
Thanks joevt.

I got lucky and found an "unlocked" installer: https://archive.org/details/10.4.10-8-r-4088-acdt

"10.4.10-8R4088-ACDT.dmg (Modified iMac7,1 install disk, no SMBIOS lock)"

I had come across this list of the build ID's of each gray disc which came with each type of Mac http://yongcomputer.com.au/xe/Download/3917 and then I started searching archive.org for those numbers, and got lucky with this find!

I created a bootable USB flash drive in the typical way https://lifehacker.com/how-to-burn-your-own-os-x-lion-install-dvd-or-usb-drive-5823096 though I used GUID map rather than Apple map.

This worked on both the x86 (Core Duo) and amd64 (Core 2 Duo) minis.
 
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cellularmitosis said:
I know, technically this isn't a PowerPC machine, but I figure all of the Apple retrocomputing knowledge is in this subforum :)

As part of (eventually) trying to port Golang to PowerPC Macs, an incremental step would be porting their existing Darwin/x86 support back from Snow Leopard to Leopard and Tiger.

Because of this, I've just acquired a 32-bit and 64-bit first-gen Mac Minis.

And I'm having a heck of a time getting these machines to boot from any Intel Tiger disc I throw at them.

Leopard and Snow Leopard install just fine, but Tiger in particular seems troublesome.

It seems Apple only started adding Intel support to the Tiger discs after 10.4.6. But even the 10.4.6 and 10.4.7 discs I've tried don't work.

(Specifically, they will show up in the alt boot menu, and you can start the boot process, you'll see the grey apple and spinner, but after about a minute the grey apple just turns into a grey no-entry symbol and it seems to just spin forever. Again, Leopard and Snow Leopard install just fine, so there isn't a problem with the hardware or discs).

But then I came across this post: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mac-mini-tiger-install-disc-wont-boot.762000/



So now I'm wondering if some of the disc images I have are actually grey discs, and if I need this magical hidden OEM partition for them to work correctly?

Anyone have any experience with this? This post seems to be the only post on the internet which mentions this magical OEM partition theory.
Click to expand...

Haha, I just today got MacMini Core2Duo – with an idea to try using 10A190 on it (which can be used on PPC natively too).
 
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Right - let me stop you all there. Yes these machines ran Tiger but it wasn't a retail version of Tiger. You couldn't go out and buy a boxed copy of Tiger that you could use on PPC and Intel. The first version of Mac OS to support both platforms was 10.5 Leopard.

These machines came with a SPECIFIC version of Mac OS 10.4 just for the target machine in question. I only know this because I decided I wanted a 10.4 install on my Core Solo Mac mini and went down a whole rabbit hole for this. From what I tried, the only way to get Tiger onto such a machine is to find an image of the restore disk.

Whilst I don't remember which version I downloaded, it was something like this:

archive.org

691 5867 A,2Z,Mac mini. Mac OS X Install Disc 1. Mac OS v10.4.7. AHT v3A102. Disc v1.1 2006 (DVD DL) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

691 5867 A,2Z,Mac mini. Mac OS X Install Disc 1. Mac OS v10.4.7. AHT v3A102. Disc v1.1 2006 (DVD DL)
archive.org

Hope this helps

pac
 
Just to share another option, Apple officially provide the Mac OS X Server 10.4.7 (Universal) Build 8K1079 image as a free download at developer.apple.com (login, then through to More Downloads and search)

I used this in a VM via Virtualbox and had it updated to 10.4.11. I was using this VM for some time with macports installed, then purchased a macmini2,1 (mid-2007) and restored the VM image onto a partition on the HDD.

Works perfectly as an Intel Tiger machine for my dev builds.
 
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cellularmitosis said:
I know, technically this isn't a PowerPC machine, but I figure all of the Apple retrocomputing knowledge is in this subforum :)
Click to expand...
Just wanted to chime in on this. The Early Intel subforum has most of the same users as this one, and was started because a lot of us continued to ask for it.

These kinds of posts are why we wanted the early Intel forum started.
 
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