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asarkhentamentiu

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 5, 2021
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Guys, how’s it going. Any way to reformat this system? I got this message with a usb stick created in windows with transmac; I tried lion and El Capitan too. Also cleared nvram with nothing. Help please !
 
your is the mid-2010 which will run high sierra

download from apple site and do the usb boot:

erase your USB as GUID and macOS journaled, with name as "MyVolume", then run this command in terminal.
sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyVolume

After that boot up and press option key, then boot from the usb and install on your mini
 
OP wrote:
"I have access to other Macs if that would make it easier to recover.."

DO NOT use Transmac.

Instead, go to another Mac, download the copy of the OS installer you need, and then use either "Install Disk Creator" or "DiskMaker X" to create the USB flashdrive installer.

Then try to boot that way.
 
Guys, how’s it going. Any way to reformat this system? I got this message with a usb stick created in windows with transmac; I tried lion and El Capitan too. Also cleared nvram with nothing. Help please !

Yes, you can, provided the hard drive itself is OK.

Because you have other Macs (with ostensibly at least one with FireWire and at least Leopard), this should be fairly straightforward. Let’s call that second Mac your source Mac. You’re aiming to get Snow Leopard to install and boot properly on the Mac mini, your target Mac.

A somewhat similar situation came up last week, in that getting Snow Leopard on a early Intel Mac mini was the user’s goal. For the steps I laid out for them, follow the steps using Carbon Copy Cloner and a retail image of Snow Leopard on the source Mac (on which you’ll be creating that new partition, onto which you’ll block-copy the Snow Leopard retail DVD image). You can label this disk as anything, but maybe something like “SL installer” will keep it clear.

Once all of this is done, open System Preferences > Startup Disk on your source Mac. Select Target Disk Mode…. This will reboot your source Mac into FireWire Target Disk Mode. Now, connect that source Mac to your target Mac (the Mac mini) with a FireWire cable. Next, when you power on your target Mac/Mac mini, hold down the Option key until you are presented with a list of drive options. Select the “SL installer” drive (or however you named it) from your source Mac.

Now, the target Mac should boot properly into the Snow Leopard installer, via the FireWire link. From there, either install a standard install, following the steps, or use Disk Utility to first configure how you want to set up the hard drive inside the target Mac/Mac mini, taking care to use a GUID/GPT partition map. Once done, and once you’ve verified that the target Mac/Mac mini is booting into Snow Leopard correctly, you can then reboot your source Mac and, using Disk Utility once more, remove that “SL installer” partition (much as described in the link above).

Let us know how it goes.
 
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I don’t have a FireWire cable

I’m trying install disk creator but no success

seems apple doesn’t host the high Sierra dmg anymore and finding one that works is proving to be difficult
 
Did you use the patcher just to download High Sierra and then create an unmodified bootable installer manually e.g. using createinstallmedia?

(You don’t need a patched installer for the 2010 Mac mini. Sorry if I wasn’t clear enough in my previous message.)
 
Well I downloaded high Sierra using the installer and just directed it toward the image and the target drive
 
This is with the dosdude
What next ?

I’m aware this may not be what you prefer to hear, but your options distill to these three paths — all of which involve either having the right equipment or finding/buying that equipment:

  1. The FireWire Target Disk Mode method I described earlier in this thread (requires a FireWire cable, which fortunately are still available to buy online — either FW800-to-FW800 (pictured), or FW800-to-FW400, if your other Mac lacks FW800);
  2. Taking out the Mac mini’s hard drive and connecting it to a SATA-to-USB adapter, then connecting the hard drive to the adapter and connecting the USB cable to your working Mac (also available to buy online, but has more components than a FireWire cable), to install either using the above method or the dosdude1 method;
  3. Procuring a used Snow Leopard retail DVD online and inserting it in your Mac mini.
That’s basically it.

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(1)

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(3)
 
Kind of interesting tho. I ran the createinstallmedia command in terminal and it seems to successfully created a bootable install disk. However,


The good mac is a pro dual Xeon. Slow as molasses tho, only 2gb ram. it reads the disk as “install macOS high Sierra”

the mini sees this as “macOS base system” and still fails

I get my only options. But why, what happened to cause this ?
 
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