Clearly there must be a way to do this, right? Can I install off an external hard drive? Off a USB drive? Share my macbook pro's DVD drive somehow? If the hard drive on the mac mini is completely reformatted and I plug it into the USB port on the external hard drive which I partition and install the Leopard DMG would it be able to boot off of it?
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Mac Mini: Wiped hard drive, broken DVD Drive - How do I install Leopard?
- Thread starter pokeydonut
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USB external DVD drive or put your MacBook Pro into Target Disk Mode and share the DVD drive in it over FireWire.
Put the Macbook Pro in Target disk mode? Then what? There's no OS on the Mac Mini. I boot the Mini while holding down option or something?
Yes, option on the Mac mini. The MacBook Pro will be recognized as a FireWire drive and anything in the DVD drive will mount as well.
Be very careful you don't install OS X or wipe the MacBook Pro's hard drive instead of the Mac mini's.
How is the mac mini going to "recognize" anything when there's no OS on the hard drive? Sorry, I know this is a dumb question but I've never dealt with a wiped hard drive before.
Hold down T on the Macbook Pro, hold down option on the Mac Mini. The Mac Mini's going to start up and somehow there'll be an option for booting from the hard drive of the Macbook Pro or from the DVD drive of the macbook pro and I'm going to pick DVD drive and it's going to install Leopard on the Mac Mini.
How would I accidentally re-install Leopard on the Macbook Pro hard drive exactly so I can know what to avoid?
Thanks for the help, I definitely don't want to wipe my laptop.
Is this plan better or worse than getting a dmg of leopard on an external hard drive and then somehow booting from there?
Hold down T on the Macbook Pro, hold down option on the Mac Mini. The Mac Mini's going to start up and somehow there'll be an option for booting from the hard drive of the Macbook Pro or from the DVD drive of the macbook pro and I'm going to pick DVD drive and it's going to install Leopard on the Mac Mini.
How would I accidentally re-install Leopard on the Macbook Pro hard drive exactly so I can know what to avoid?
Thanks for the help, I definitely don't want to wipe my laptop.
Is this plan better or worse than getting a dmg of leopard on an external hard drive and then somehow booting from there?
You don't need any operating system since all of this is going to be handled at the firmware level.
When you run the Leopard installer you're going to see two drives. One is going to be the Macbook Pro and the other the Mac Mac mini.
When you run the Leopard installer you're going to see two drives. One is going to be the Macbook Pro and the other the Mac Mac mini.
+ 1 on that... happended to me once
between 2 macbooks.On my second try I realized that I could never see the correct hard drive I wanted to install to. When going throught the installation process the only HDD I could see was the one in the Macbook in target mode (which let me to my deadly mistake). I ended up having to put the HDD from the macbook with the broken optical drive in the other to get it to work.
Got it. When I'm choosing drives, will it say the size of the drives? That's probably a good way to tell the Macbook Pro from the Mini.
So the problem appears to be more serious than I was led to believe. The mac mini shuts off after 60 seconds no matter what. The target disk thing works great, it sees the Leopard disc in the macbook, but it shuts off before i can do anything about it. Has anyone experienced this? I opened it up and the RAM seems to be seated correctly. What would allow it to turn on briefly but then immediately turn it off? I reset the PRAM and nothing happened.