Hey,
I need to reinstall Mac OS X 10.6 on my Mac Mini as my hard drive doesn't appear to be booting. However, I cannot reinstall it through the OS install DVD as the DVD drive is not working either. I don't have any other Macs on hand to help create a boot disk or something so does anyone else have any solutions?
Thanks,
Spend $30-$40 and buy an external DVD reader. Amazon has several, as does Best Buy and others.
Your going to need a external blank (preferably Firewire 800) drive if your not capable of replacing your Mini's internal drive.
http://eshop.macsales.com/installvideos/
Your going to need a external DVD drive, or use a friends Mac with one and follow these instructions to place 10.6 on a bootable USB thumb drive to install on the external or new internal drive.
http://www.maciverse.com/install-os-x-snow-leopard-from-usb-flash-drive.html
To boot from the external drive, hold the option key down on a wired keyboard and select it to boot from, set it as the Startup disk in System Preferences.
As it turns out, I'm currently running Lion, sorry for the confusion. With Lion I can access the Recovery HD and I have a number of options such as reinstalling Lion and using the disk utility (I can even access my standard HD's files which is quite unusual as it won't boot). Is there a way I can create a Lion bootable USB drive from the Recovery HD by redownloading Lion?
Thanks,
You can create a Lion Recovery USB from a friends computer, which is then used to download Lion from Apple's servers to install on a drive.
If you can't do that, then your back to installing 10.6 first, the upgrading to 10.6.8, then upgrading to 10.7, then making the USB above if you ever need it.
How to reinstall Mac OS X with dead hard drive and no DVD drive?
