Replaced Mac Mini (Intel) w/ New Drive - How Do You Get OSX On It?

[banjomamo]

Hey All,

I bought a new core duo mac mini. I replaced the stock drive with a 7200 rpm drive. When I first booted it of the install disc it could not see any drives. So I booted the drive in target mode and hooked it up to my powermac. I used disc utility to format the drive to hfs+ (journaled) and I can see the drive now when I try to install OS X on it but it has a red exclamation point and says it cannot install OSX.

Any ideas?

 

[iBookG4user]

did you make sure the drive was hooked up correctly? Do you know if it is a faulty drive? Have you tried the repair disc command on the hard drive?

 

[banjomamo]

yeah it checks out good in target disk mode. shoudl i be able to just install osx on a blank drive like that?

 

[iBookG4user]

You should be able to. Although I've tried to use the hack to install mac os x on my windows box using some UNIX commands from mac os x while the drive was connected through USB and it didn't work. I tried several times and then it killed my mobo. (It was probably something else though) That is the limit of my knowledge on using Macs with different hard drives than they were shipped with though.

 

[generik]

You should be able to. Although I've tried to use the hack to install mac os x on my windows box using some UNIX commands from mac os x while the drive was connected through USB and it didn't work. I tried several times and then it killed my mobo. (It was probably something else though) That is the limit of my knowledge on using Macs with different hard drives than they were shipped with though.

How can software possibly kill your mobo?

 

[dpaanlka]

Hey All,

I bought a new core duo mac mini. I replaced the stock drive with a 7200 rpm drive. When I first booted it of the install disc it could not see any drives. So I booted the drive in target mode and hooked it up to my powermac. I used disc utility to format the drive to hfs+ (journaled) and I can see the drive now when I try to install OS X on it but it has a red exclamation point and says it cannot install OSX.

Any ideas?

If the installer cant see a drive to install on, then there is definetely a problem that will likely cause Mac OS X to not run. You most likely haven't formatted the drive to a Macintosh format. Do so by booting back into your install disk, and going to Disk Utility.

 

[banjomamo]

For those that run into this problem, you have to go to disk utility from the install cd and partition the drive as a GUID partition. Then the Intel Mac mini or Macbook/Pro can see the drive and let you install OSX on it.