Rufus provides a few options for the partition scheme and the target computer type, one of which is GPT Partition Scheme for UEFI computer. A bit of Googling later and I’ve found out Mac Mini’s don’t have BIOS they have UEFI to link their software and hardware and therefore they require a bootable USB stick to be setup for a UEFI computer. There I could see both internal hard disks which were setup in a bootable RAID 1 array. Putting the stick into the back of the Mac I held down the left ALT button on my keyboard and booted it up and was shown the boot device menu.

I grabbed a spare 8GB stick, downloaded Rufus and created a bootable stick using the ISO I had of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

So, the only sensible way of getting an OS on it was via a USB stick. Let’s install Linux on the Mac.Įinstein is a dual 500GB HDD Mac Mini with 2GB of RAM and no optical drive. The GUI is awful and I always found myself dropping to the command line to do things. And finally, I hated MacOS 10 Server with a passion. Second, I am moderately comfortable with Ubuntu server because it’s what’s running on my managed web servers. Firstly, the Mac repair place assured me they could find nothing wrong with the hardware in the computer so presumably there was something wrong with the OS. Ditch MacOS 10 and try installing Linux (namely Ubuntu server) on it. And this time I decided on something drastic. So, I decided to have one last go at getting “Einstein” working. Something to act as a file server and something with a Unix based operating system on it so I can run CRON jobs and do various other things. I needed the Mac Mini working or failing that, something else.

Einstein – A 2011 Mac Mini with 2GB of RAM and dual 500GB Hard Disks

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