Newb here. help with mac mini

[vtwinjunkie]

Greetings all.

I have a used mac mini (few years old, shipped with maverics) that I am trying to play with and use at home in my spare time.

It was used as a server and has softraid on it. When booting into recovery mode and opening disk utility (I see softraid media listed as main partition), I see multiple partitions and the main one is a 999.85 softraid_media partition.

Can I wipe everything and remove the raid and just load mavericks?

I know nothing about softraid (or what it means to have it) so please be gentle!

Thanks

 

[Crosscreek]

Greetings all.

I have a used mac mini (few years old, shipped with maverics) that I am trying to play with and use at home in my spare time.

It was used as a server and has softraid on it. When booting into recovery mode and opening disk utility (I see softraid media listed as main partition), I see multiple partitions and the main one is a 999.85 softraid_media partition.

Can I wipe everything and remove the raid and just load mavericks?

I know nothing about softraid (or what it means to have it) so please be gentle!

Thanks

Which Mini do you have?

 

[vtwinjunkie]

Which Mini do you have?

This one.

https://support.apple.com/kb/SP660?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

 

[Crosscreek]

This one.

https://support.apple.com/kb/SP660?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

That's a good one. If you have an Apple ID and password you can go to the App store and download El Capitan and down load it. It's much more efficient than Mavericks.

Once it is downloaded you can do a fresh install.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372

Here is more instruction if the Apple support is confusing.
http://osxdaily.com/2015/09/30/create-os-x-el-capitan-boot-install-drive/

Here is instruction for fresh install

http://osxdaily.com/2015/10/01/clean-install-os-x-el-capitan-mac/

 

[AppleNewton]

You will need to break the RAID set from Disk Utility, preferably from Internet recovery (holding Option Command R)

you can click on each partition name and select erase and that should help.

this video covers some of that:

apple articles:
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH20582?locale=en_US&viewlocale=en_US

 

[Fishrrman]

Just some thoughts:

The late-2012 model you have is generally regarded as the best version of the Mini.

Be aware that some of them sold as "servers" came with TWO hard drives inside. Could this be the case with yours?

If you want REALLY good performance from it, you need an SSD.
BUT -- you don't necessarily have to open it up to install one.
It's just as easy to add an SSD via USB3, and make that your "external booter".
It will run as fast that way as messing with it to put an SSD -inside-.

Do you have any SSD's available?
If not, you might consider something like this:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00ZTRY532?tag=delt-20

Just plug-it-in-and-go.
Boot to recovery, initialize it with Disk Utility, and then use internet recovery to put a clean copy of OS 10.11 onto it.

Get booted and running from the SSD, and then "operate" on the internal drives as required.

 

[MH01]

Sound like its come with pre-installed software etc.

My suggestion would be to delete everything and start from a fresh install. You have no idea what is installed on it,many from a privacy / security risk it's not worth it