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.