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Mac mini won't take OS 10.4

R

rogerchristian

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 11, 2006
2
0
I have purchased a number of Mac Minis (G4) for my business. All have been able to load/use Tiger without problem, except one. I get a notice something like "You cannot run Tiger on this Mac".

I was under the (mistaken?) impression that Tiger would run on any Mac Mini (Non-intel). Anyone have thoughts or information on this>?

Thanks,
Roger Christian
 
Weird, maybe a firmware bug or something, try to see if there's a update for your Mac mini firmware... The Mac mini (Intel or PPC) should work with any release of OS X to date, even Leopard. Maybe call Apple.
 
Is that mini newer than the others? The last of the G4 minis shipped with 10.4.2. It sometimes won't work to install an older OS X on a later model, so if your Tiger discs are early ones, that could be the problem.

Do you still have the install disc that came with the machine? Maybe try from there.

(of course, none of this will apply if this is an early mini that shipped with 10.3.7, on such a beast I would expect Tiger to install without problems unless there is a hardware fault.)
 
Licensing is not an issue.

First off, all Mac Minis would have shipped with Tiger pre-installed (thus fully licensed).

As far as Apple's licensing scheme, there are no product keys or installation media id checks to determine how many copies are capable of being installed.

They trust that you will do the right thing.

What I would recommend is powering up in Target Disk Mode (hold the T key at boot up), plug the mini in over firewire to another mac. Open Disk Utility, select the hard disk on the remote computer, format it, restart the other mac, insert your installation disk, try to install.

If this does not work, then you may want to reset your OpenFirmware on that system.

If that still does not work, then you may want to go back to Target Disk Mode, install over firewire onto the problematic mini, connect to Software Update and check to see if there were any firmware updates.

Again, this is all if you do not want to take it into an Apple store where they will most likely resolve this problem same day in front of you for no charge (usually a direct swap for something like this where there is no important data or reason why you would need to keep that physical hardware).
 
I am positive that atleast for the iMacs and Powerbooks from the 2005 Macworld Expo that shipped with Panther received a free upgrade to Tiger when it was released in April.

I had assumed that it would also apply to all other models but perhaps I am mistaken.

I got the free update for my personal powerbook and my father got it for his iMac after he heard about how I got the upgrade for free by going into the apple store.
 
projectle said:
I am positive that atleast for the iMacs and Powerbooks from the 2005 Macworld Expo that shipped with Panther received a free upgrade to Tiger when it was released in April.
Click to expand...

That definitely didn't work for us, but we did use the actual purchase dates in the forms. The check used by Apple wasn't very picky about the date part and would allow fudging.
 
Well, in my case, they were models that were newly introduced after Macworld, so it was pretty obvious that it was purchased afterwards.
 
The Tiger cutoff date was 12 April, not January. People did easily circumvent the checks, but machines bought before then really weren't eligible for the up-to-date program.
 
Good to know.

I was never told that by the service technicians nor the store manager who I personally thanked for the whole thing and how I was so pleased that Apple cared about their customers so that people who were so confident in the new stuff would purchase it immediately and know that they would be taken care of with the very exciting software updates coming just weeks down the road.
 
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