Installing older Mac OS X?

[Kiwi79]

I have an old Mac Mini from circa 2009. I was considering selling it as it's not being used much so I wiped it and was going to do a fresh install from some discs I had from another Mac but install disc 1 turns out to not like loading.

How can I work out what the highest version my mac can run is and where can I get hold of the older OS X in a legitimate way.

I think it would have shipped with Snow Leopard but as I bought it second hand years back I have no discs.

Thanks

[xeny]

Feed the serial number from the outside of the case into https://appleserialnumberinfo.com/Desktop/index.ph...

Use that to find the version which you can then look up at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Mini - expand the relevant section and it will tell you the last supported OS version.

Then visit https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT211683 , put that on a USB stick and boot from that.

[plenty]

Complete installers for old versions of OS X are available for free download. Depending on your model of Mac you’ll need either El Capitan or Sierra.

https://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/download-old-os-...

[Kiwi79]

Thanks for the replies guys. If it try to install El Cap or Yosemite will it not ask me for a licence key or anything like that if the machine originally only had up to Snow Leopard?

[devnull]

Nope, MacOS doesn’t work like that. It has a license to use, but doesn’t need a key. So long as your Mac is genuine apple hardware, you’re good to go. (License wise you’re not allowed to install macOS on a hackintosh computer, but I doubt anyone is being done by apple for that).

All you need to do is determine the newest OS your machine can handle and install that.

[tog]

The oldest versions are not available to download from Apple any more that I can find, and the earlier OS X updates were paid upgrades anyway. You can find original discs for most Macs on ebay, and also older OS install discs, but never for quite as cheap as you would hope. I have an old iBook G4 knocking about that I will probably simply wipe and sell for parts with no OS. I suspect that anyone who wants an old machine like that will have the discs to make it work.

[sutoka]

You can download them and install via a USB or if you don't want the hassle you can buy most of the old OS on a USB on eBay for less than a tenner.

I installed High Sierra on a 2007 iMac and it was surprisingly quick for it's age. I mean Adobe Creative Suite it struggled with but for general growing the internet it was quite nippy.

[Grayedout]

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT211683