Way more work than expected
Have you ever found an old piece of hardware, memories coming to your head about how it was an awesome piece of tech on its day and thought wouldn’t be so cool to re purpose it? Give it a new life perhaps…
Enter the Mac mini 1,1 (2006 core duo, 32 bits). Doesn’t it uses a 32 bits cpu? What you say about modern OSes not longer carrying the i386 tag? Surely nothing to worry about right? Oh wait! This PC introduced EFI so it can not be so hard… Except it is an odd 32bit EFI which prefer booting old APM and EFI partitions and read only from old HFS+ filesystems for which you know there is not really any modern OS ISO available except outdated OS X versions.
Maybe you can create your own image to boot but it does sound as way too much work and do remember how modern OSes do dropped real 32 bits support so you’ll need to figure out a way around the bootx64.efi. Not so trivial now. You ask but why are you telling me this Adrian? Well glad to hear you asking : )
I did rebuild my mini with a new HDD and expected to quickly set it up with any Linux distro after buying some iFixIT repair tools (because why not? Maybe I will try to replace my phone battery… someday). A weekend project I said to myself alas I was not prepared for the pains on dealing with fully outdated software/hardware like lack of documentation or tools to do the job.
Google does have answers if you know what to ask but still I wished for a a better guide with links to the tools and of course tailored to the mac mini 1,1 (2006) instead of some random hackintosh issue or any other different PC guide. With this said let me summarize such guide just in case there is anyone else attempting this.
Purpose:
Install modern OS on mac mini 1,1 model. My intended use was a simple network file server, but having other macs on the house made me wonder why not set it up as a time machine server, naturally, on itself this task may result on a rabbit hole to fall, but let me save myself the trouble here and point you to this other article for that — https://techsmix.net/timemachine-backups-debian-8-jessi/
Tools needed:
- rEFIt (link)
- HDDRawCopy1.10Portable (link)
- Your target OS iso – I used Debian mac netinstall iso (link)
- 2 USB drives
Steps:
- Extract the rEFIt cdr image (if gzipped)
- “Burn” it into a Flash drive via HDDRawCopy
- Burn OS into the second Flash drive via any tool of your taste (I like Etcher or rufus)
- Insert both drives into the mini
- Power on and select boot Legacy OS
- Your OS should present itself or a guided install
- When finished remember to remove the USB drives
Conclusion:
Not really that hard just not well documented, many people seemed to face this issue (SYMPTOM: mini not booting from USB) and not figuring out why (CAUSE: Lack of proper EFI partition or boot files). And while my rant is long, trust me, my wasted time was longer as I burned many ISOS without understanding what I missed. FIX: Use a boot manager for EFI.
