2012 Mac mini won't boot from ex-Mac Pro SSD

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154 points

2012 Mac mini won't boot from ex-Mac Pro SSD

I have a Mid 2010 Mac Pro as well as a Late 2012 Mac mini.

I recently replaced the Mac Pro's 240 GB OWC SSD with a newer 480 GB OWC SSD. That's all working fine.

The Mac mini just has a single 1 TB internal drive. (It runs Yosemite 10.10.5 for the moment; it's a fresh system with essentially nothing on it.)

I want to transplant the old SSD into the Mac mini. I have it in an external 2.5" USB case momentarily for testing before the transplant.

The SSD has two partitions; one is Mac OS X 10.6.8 and the other is a Windows 7 BootCamp partition.

I can't boot it up into Windows - it BSODs pretty quickly. (Given Windows' finicky nature about precise hardware matching, I'm not surprised.)

But I was surprised to see that it wouldn't boot into 10.6.8. I realize it came from a completely different machine, sure.

I thought if I manually removed the kernel caches (while booted off the 1 TB 10.10.5 internal HDD) and set the boot flags to boot in Safe Mode, it would boot.

Well, it doesn't. It gets through about 10 lines of "..." dots after mentioning "Loading drivers" and then it gets stuck before the end.

I thought a 2012 Mac mini could boot 10.6.8, surely?

I thought removing the kernel caches would let it boot in 'generic' fashion?

Is my only recourse to re-install 10.6.8 - or just say screw it and install a fresh 10.10.5 (I can't go to El Capitan due to it not being mature and some audio drivers that might not work)? I'd prefer to avoid the latter if possible. Maybe I missed some cache file(s) someplace that also needed to be nuked?

Mac mini, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5), Late 2012, 16 GB RAM, 1TB HDD

Posted on Nov 27, 2015 3:14 AM

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Answer 1

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jndupuis1

Level 2

462 points

Nov 27, 2015 5:00 AM in response to Greg Earle

Hi Greg,

I have a Mac Mini ( late 2012 ) 10.10.5 w/16 GB as well. Snow Leopard will not boot on a Intel 2012 Mac. I have seen where you can use Target Disk Mode with Firewire to install, but, still leads to problems. Mac (mid 2010) is the Intel Ivy Bridge. Mac (late 2012) is the Intel Sandy Bridge. Two totally different Intel computers. You can recover your personal files from you HDD via USB external. Booting not not possible. There are numerous discussions on this here on Apple Support and if you search the WWW. Mac World, Mac Rumors. I bought Snow Leopard from Apple Store when I first purchased my Mac Mini due to a salesperson's misinformation. It is tucked away in a cabinet that holds all my incompatible legacy software. Hope this answers your question. I may have the Sandy and Ivy Bridge thing backwards on the Models, but you get my point. Take care.

Cheers!!

John

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Answer 2

Nov 27, 2015 5:00 AM in response to Greg Earle

The Mac mini late 2012 model needs a minimum of OS X 10.8 aka. Mountain Lion.

I do not believe Boot Camp supports booting from a USB drive, it might work with a Thunderbolt connected drive. As it happens most Thunderbolt drives look like eSATA drives, remember Thunderbolt uses a PCIe style data channel for anything that is not a Displayport monitor.

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Answer 3

Greg Earle Author

Level 2

154 points

Nov 27, 2015 5:06 AM in response to Greg Earle

Thanks both Johns!

For some reason I thought that 'vintage' Mac mini could still boot 10.6.8. Not a big deal, hopefully I can just do a Yosemite install in place on it. I have everything on that (old) SSD elsewhere, it's just more of a pain to transfer stuff over the network - so I was trying to take the path of least resistance at first.

Interesting about the BootCamp issue. I'm going to have the SSD installed internally in the next couple of days so once it's actually inside I'll try the boot test again and see if it BSOD's in the same way. Not a big deal either, but it would be cool if I could get it to work, or at least get Windows to come up in some mode that would allow it to fix the things that were different hardware-wise.

I'm not sure it'll let me mark both of your posts as "This solved my question" - but this solved my question 😉

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