Q: Partition MacMini HD for PowerPC Aaps
I have a 2014 macmini running 10.11. I have an old photoshop program that’s PowerPC and my current computer will not support it.
I’m thinking of creating a Hard drive partition with 10.3 ( which is what I have some old discs of, probably can upgrade online) and running it from there.
I have a 500 Gb hard drive about 50% full.
Anyone know if it will work? And will I be able to share files between the OS’s in a dropbox or something ?
Thanks!
Mac mini, OS X El Capitan (10.11.5), 4GB Ram, 500 GB HD
Posted on Jul 11, 2016 10:12 AM
You cannot install an older operating system than the one the machine came with directly.
Hardware and driver differences make it impossible to do so functionally. In other words OSx 10.3 would not contain the drivers required to work with the hardware in your 2014 computer.
Also yes, PPC is the old Apple architecture which was replaced by the more universally compatible Intel architecture. 10.3 is written for PPC architecture / hardware, which means it's addressing commands, functions and hardware that do not exist on an Intel Mac.
Intel architecture cannot on its own run PPC software or PPC based OSes like 10.3, it requires a Translator so to speak. This used to be for OSx versions up to 10.6 a built in application called Rosetta . It has since been dropped and no longer supported in newer OSx versions since 10.7.
You need to run it virtually, so you can recreate an old PPC type platform with the Virtual computer manager such as Parallels or VirtualBox
Due to licensing, only server versions of OSx can be run virtually on a Mac.
Posted on Jul 11, 2016 11:00 AM
