looking for mavericks and yosemite

[dark_preacher]

i'm new to macs and the macosx world after using iphone/ipad for many years and i've always been a windows user.

currently bought a couple mac mini's to mess around with, one is older macmini which will support up to 10.11 el capitan and a late 2011 which will support on through to 10.13 high sierra.

here are current osx on these

mac mini older - 10.6 final build
mac mini newer - 10.8.5 - mountain lion

i'm looking to go back and collect the macos i don't have. waiting on a power brick for the older mini as that one was lost in the mail. when i get that one in i will be able to add el capitan to my account. i currently have 10.12 - sierra and 10.13 - high sierra added to my account. will be adding el capitan. i have the physical media for 10.6 which was included with the older unit so i should be covered through most releases of macos.

first question - is it possible to create a usb installer off the new mac mini's recovery partition that has 10.8 on the recovery partition? this would leave me only needing to buy the apple download for 10.7 - lion and try to find some way to get the macos mavericks and mac os yosemite installers that i'm missing. i'm wanting to try a lot of different installs across these two machines and just get a greatest hits of how the os has changed over the years and settle on something a little older that still will work well for the older mini. i did find checksums for the install files to verify if they are correct but i haven't had much luck sourcing these. does anybody know if apple plans to make these available again in the future?
[doublepost=1539911909][/doublepost]also possible to pull 10.6 install media off the recovery partition on the older mini? i'm going to try and create usb installer disks for each os and do this testing. i would really like to be able to put a recovery partition back on the hard drive during install as well. also i know it may be a long shot but is it possible to put multiple install images on one flash drive?

 

[dark_preacher]

anybody got a good answer to this? i tried running 10.11 on my late 2009 mac mini but performance was not at an acceptable level. does anybody know if there's any real world performance differences between mavericks, yosemite and el capitan on older hardware?

 

[DeltaMac]

Yes, you can do multiple system installs on one flash drive. I have a 64GB flash drive, with partitions for each system install since OS X 10.5 Leopard, up to macOS 10.14 Mojave. (That's 11 partitions - There's only 3GB free for the 11th partition, which I'm sure will not be enough space left for an install of 10.15 - whatever that will be.)

Your 2009 will work better on more recent operating systems if you replace the spinning hard drive with an SSD.

The 2009 mini will not have a recovery system partition, unless you have installed Lion or newer.
If the 2009 DOES have a recovery partition, then it won't have 10.6 - it WILL give you the possibility to download the system installer for whichever system newer than 10.6 that you last installed. If you were using El Capitan, then the recovery system will have support for that, and nothing else.
Just to make this clear - Snow Leopard does not support a recovery system partition, it's too old.
You CAN do a Disk Utility restore of the Snow Leopard installer DVD to a flash drive, if you like. That's how I make Snow Leopard installer partitions.
Both of your minis can be upgraded to at least 8GB memory. Both can have SSDs installed. Both would benefit from doing both upgrades.
And, with those upgrades, both minis would work well with any system you want to use on them. I somstimes boot from another partition with an older system on my 2012 mini, as it will run 10.8.5, and will also boot to 10.14. I have old bootable backups that I use for various software that runs better on an older OS X system. I probably like Yosemite the most, but my normal boot is Mojave.

 

[dark_preacher]

heres where i'm at. i went ahead and did an upgrade from snow leopard to el capitan on the 2009 so i could make an el capitan usb drive. got one of those made.

well i took my 2009 apart to clean the superdrive lens as it was not reading any optical media so i could reinstall snow leopard on the mechanical disk. got that going again, reinstalled snow leopard, also blew this out with my air compressor and tried several 4gb sticks of ram trying to get 8gb functional in this unit. didn't have anything that would work with this unit, seems to be timing/tolerances are much more crucial on these than in the pc world of things. i've been using the 2009 for a few weeks with the casing off and all the screws and springs out. went ahead and ordered 8gb corsair ram that should work in this machine and also ordered a 250gb wd blue ssd. not sure where the drive controller chipsets on newer drives ends up shaking out on compatibility with these, hopefully i'll end up with 3gb/s on this unit with the ssd. is there anything i will need to do other than enable trim on here after the install?

also the newer mini already has 16gb of ram, the situation on that one is a little more cut and dry, i'll probably just buy an additional 250/500gb wd blue for that one and be done. will put high sierra on there and call it a day.

 

[dark_preacher]

got the parts today and was able to do upgrades to the 2009 mac mini. put this one back on el capitan and i'm happy to report it is much more acceptable performance wise now. the drive i ended up putting in it is able to perform at the full 3gb link this machine is capable of as well. just a heads up for anyone in a similar situation the wd blue's work fine on these at full bandwidth on the sata bus.

 

[DeltaMac]

It's another success story after upgrading to an SSD. Glad to hear that everything is working better for you now!