I created a partition on my brand new, out-of-the-box 2014 Mac mini with the intention of installing 10.9 on it so I can boot into either 10.9 or 10.10. Obviously this new Mac mini already has 10.10 pre-installed. How do I install 10.9 on the partition? I have created a 10.9 boot disk but don't seem to be getting anywhere. What am I doing wrong? FYI my new partition is 150Gb.
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Install 10.9 on 10.10 partition
- Thread starter nathob
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Been that way for as long as I can remember. Support for the hardware is baked into the OS that it ships with at the time. It isn't ported back to old versions.
dehydrateH2O is correct. You cannot install an OS that is only than the version that shipped with your Mac. It was ever thus.
Not always correct. I had a late 2011 Macbook Pro that shipped with Lion but could perfectly run 10.6.8 without any modifications or hackery.
Surely Internet Recovery will know what was shipped on your serial and only allow that version to be installed by IR - but any OS that shipped on your model should be runnable, so if you had a 2012-model MBP that shipped with Mavericks (but earlier units shipped with say ML) then I'd expect you to be able to install any of:
ML (by bootable USB eg DiskmakerX)
Mavericks (only option by IR)
Yosemite (by bootable USB eg DiskmakerX or by App store update etc)
Surely this must be true as any original (say 2012), models that shipped with (say in this example), ML originally must be able to IR back to that - even if they had been updated to Yosemite since...
This could of course change in the future, Apple might choose to push out a concurrent FW update that means IR back to original would be impossible but that would be high-risk, however they could also update the IR records for that device and make it IR to the later version once it has been installed. High risk as I say but technically quite easy.
ML (by bootable USB eg DiskmakerX)
Mavericks (only option by IR)
Yosemite (by bootable USB eg DiskmakerX or by App store update etc)
Surely this must be true as any original (say 2012), models that shipped with (say in this example), ML originally must be able to IR back to that - even if they had been updated to Yosemite since...
This could of course change in the future, Apple might choose to push out a concurrent FW update that means IR back to original would be impossible but that would be high-risk, however they could also update the IR records for that device and make it IR to the later version once it has been installed. High risk as I say but technically quite easy.