AstroSurf's Journal: Evolving the Mac Mini

So... when this Mac was delivered (mid-2007), it was running Tiger. The previous owner upgraded it to Leopard. It was running the same OS as my old iMac; i.e., 10.5.8. So all the apps were Universal. When I got my iMac from Leigh, it was running the OS it had been supplied with, Panther. I never picked up Tiger but, when the Intel chips came along, I realized that the last OS I'd be able to run was Leopard so I went out and bought it at the Apple Store on the last day it was available! The day before Snow Leopard came out. In fact, they didn't have one on the shelf; I had to ask for it. The sales rep said, "I think we still have one in the back room." Away he went and, yes, he did come back with one.

So... recognizing that Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion AND Mavericks had come out since that time, and realizing (as I found out from Cnet) that I needed to have Snow Leopard running before I could install Lion, and realizing (also Cnet) that I could never run Mountain Lion or Mavericks, I needed to get a copy of Snow Leopard, which I was pretty sure hadn't been in the Apple Store for a long time.

A friend offered to burn me a SL install DVD and I accepted that offer but then I had another thought (and I was surprised I hadn't thought of it earlier). I torrented the retail copy of SL. I 'burned' that .dmg to my 16GB USB drive and then booted from it. I then proceeded to install SL. When done, I had 10.6. I then went to Software Update... and chose to DL the various updates. For some reason, this failed and I left the subsequent attempt to the following day. I had DL'd the 10.6.7 update package from Cnet so I decided to try that, but it just reported that to use it I had to be running 10.6.6. So I went back to Software Update...

This time it worked fine and I installed those updates, after which I was running 10.6.8 and had a v5 of Safari (installing SL had downgraded my Safari from 5 to 4, disabling my extensions), plus I had App Store in the dock, the Apple menu and the Applications folder. I thought, "Well, maybe they still have Lion in the App Store" since it's just a file and not 'inventory' per se. I poked around for a while but, sad to say, I didn't find a Lion to DL.

Fortunately, I _did_ have a USB key with (most of) Lion on it. I got this from a friend back when I was running Leopard. I knew that I couldn't upgrade to Lion without being on SL but I thought maybe I could do a 'clean install' from USB. Sadly, the key was not bootable so I never got to try that.

On the good side, once I torrented SL and installed that, it _did_ do an 'OS upgrade' install and all my data were still there, including my Time Machine settings and so forth. Nice! (I should also add that the Mini just walked onto my home network right from the start, just as though it had always been there and that includes my My Book Live, which is how I set up for Time Machine.)

As I type, Software Update... is waiting for me to restart. So I'll do that and write again when I have more info.