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@ Knighstalker: Thanks for the link. Up till now it was the consensus opinion that Snow Leopard could not be had from Apple at any price. That it is once again available resolves the whole problem of jumping through elaborate hoops to get to Lion and Mountain Lion. Of course, if you already have a copy of Snow Leopard you wouldn't want to pay for it again. Still, with two Macs in the family without an optical drive, an external drive might be a good investment.
DVD-less Snow Leopard installation on older Mac
#16
spikedds 
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Posted 01 January 2013 - 07:25 PM
Not completely related, but I just spent the last two days finding and successfully performing a Snow Leopard and Windows 7 Pro32 BootCamp install on an old Mac mini Core 2 Duo which had no functional internal optical drive. In case anyone is interested here's what I did:
Requirements: Snow Leopard Installation DVD (only if you need a clean install--which I did)
Windows 7 Pro Install DVD (I used 32-bit--haven't tried 64)
USB thumb drive at least 8GB (I used 16)
Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool (downloadable from the Microsoft store)
External optical drive (DVD or better)
Now note, that even though I had an optical drive laying around, you still cannot install Windows using an external optical drive. Nonetheless--as you will soon read--it is a necessary part of the process.
So, the first thing I did after I installed Snow Leopard was try to install Windows7 (henceforth W7) from the external bluray (BR) drive, but it does not work, because the drivers for the external drive don't load during the installation of Windows using the BootCamp Assistant (BCA). You get as far as the Mac restarting, but then it can't find a valid volume to boot from. No good.
So I said, "I'll make a copy of the install CD and put it on a thumb drive." I did that, but the thumb drive wasn't bootable, and of course that didn't work.
So I had to make the thumb drive bootable, and for that I used the free Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool which I DLed from the Microsoft store. To use that, you either need to convert your copy of W7 DVD to an .iso file or else download a copy from any of a number of possible locations on the web. The tool will erase, format, and load the iso file onto the thumbdrive and make it bootable. So I did this thinking I was "there," but no. I would get as far through the assistant as the "begin installation" screen, but the Mac could not find the DVD. It would not recognize the thumb drive as a DVD, so the machine wouldn't even restart to begin the installation process.
So, what to do? I decided to connect the BR drive with the W7 DVD AND insert the thumb drive to see if that would satisfy the beast. Nope. I was able to get the machine to restart at that point, but again I got the "cannot find a valid boot disk" screen. #@%^#$^%!
And then the light bulb came on: What if I connected both as before, but AS SOON AS I HEAR THE STARTUP CHIME, disconnect the BR drive. I did that, and the W7 installation began.
Now, some notes from the long and painful process:
First of all, when you are formatting the BC drive during the install, since it must be NTFS, you have to anyway--note that for some reason, the "BOOTCAMP" label is removed from the partition. Not sure why, but it didn't seem to matter. However, I will say that the first time I tried it, it didn't work. I had to start the BC assistant over and erase the BC volume and remake it again, and then it worked fine. Not sure why the hiccup, but was glad when it worked the second time. Actually, for some reason as I was working my wqay through this, there were more than a couple of times when I did the same exact thing twice and it worked the second time. Not sure why, but it did work. The second time through the process, I didn't have to do anything twice. I guess I worked out all of the wrinkles the first time.
I did this whole procedure twice. The first time, I made the mistake of inserting the Snow Leopard DVD and installing the included BootCamp drivers. Best I can tell, DO NOT DO THAT! After doing so, I could no longer get my mouse to work (Apple Magic Mouse) even though it had been working just fine during the entire install process before that point. After repeating this whole entire process and NOT installing BC 3.0 drivers, everything else seems to be working now. I suppose that the Win7 install itself has the drivers for the Apple MM and other newer input devices that did not exist back when OSX SL was new.
And during a normal W7 install, it is normal for the computer to restart and boot from the drive being installed from. However, the first time the computer restarts, it will try and boot off of the thumb drive again, which will result in an attempt at a second installation of W7. It is vital that at that first restart, you pull out the thumb drive.
Also note that instead of just automatically starting up from the new W7 BC volume, the computer will hang UNLESS you hold down the option key and select the Windows volume at startup. You must do this EVERY time until you also do so and boot into OS X and then go into the Startup Disk system preference pane and select the Windows volume as your startup volume. I did that only after completing my W7 install including all of the updates in Windows Update and all of the necessary restarts which are required during that process.
What you will not have is the usual Boot Camp tray icon which lets you select to restart into OS X from the windows start bar tray. I suppose that gets installed from the BC 3.0, which as I mentioned above is a no-no unless you either hate yourself, or you reeeally love the Windows 7 install process and have another 6 hours to blow.
So that's it. Feel free to steal, alter, amend this as needed. You may repost this on any and all fix-it sites, so long as you mention me when you do so. Hope this saves someone the wasted time I spent. This is great for using an "old" machine as a Windows box for simple things.
Please let me know if this helps anyone. Thanks, and sorry for the long post.
SpikeDDS
spikedds@gmail.com
Requirements: Snow Leopard Installation DVD (only if you need a clean install--which I did)
Windows 7 Pro Install DVD (I used 32-bit--haven't tried 64)
USB thumb drive at least 8GB (I used 16)
Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool (downloadable from the Microsoft store)
External optical drive (DVD or better)
Now note, that even though I had an optical drive laying around, you still cannot install Windows using an external optical drive. Nonetheless--as you will soon read--it is a necessary part of the process.
So, the first thing I did after I installed Snow Leopard was try to install Windows7 (henceforth W7) from the external bluray (BR) drive, but it does not work, because the drivers for the external drive don't load during the installation of Windows using the BootCamp Assistant (BCA). You get as far as the Mac restarting, but then it can't find a valid volume to boot from. No good.
So I said, "I'll make a copy of the install CD and put it on a thumb drive." I did that, but the thumb drive wasn't bootable, and of course that didn't work.
So I had to make the thumb drive bootable, and for that I used the free Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool which I DLed from the Microsoft store. To use that, you either need to convert your copy of W7 DVD to an .iso file or else download a copy from any of a number of possible locations on the web. The tool will erase, format, and load the iso file onto the thumbdrive and make it bootable. So I did this thinking I was "there," but no. I would get as far through the assistant as the "begin installation" screen, but the Mac could not find the DVD. It would not recognize the thumb drive as a DVD, so the machine wouldn't even restart to begin the installation process.
So, what to do? I decided to connect the BR drive with the W7 DVD AND insert the thumb drive to see if that would satisfy the beast. Nope. I was able to get the machine to restart at that point, but again I got the "cannot find a valid boot disk" screen. #@%^#$^%!
And then the light bulb came on: What if I connected both as before, but AS SOON AS I HEAR THE STARTUP CHIME, disconnect the BR drive. I did that, and the W7 installation began.
Now, some notes from the long and painful process:
First of all, when you are formatting the BC drive during the install, since it must be NTFS, you have to anyway--note that for some reason, the "BOOTCAMP" label is removed from the partition. Not sure why, but it didn't seem to matter. However, I will say that the first time I tried it, it didn't work. I had to start the BC assistant over and erase the BC volume and remake it again, and then it worked fine. Not sure why the hiccup, but was glad when it worked the second time. Actually, for some reason as I was working my wqay through this, there were more than a couple of times when I did the same exact thing twice and it worked the second time. Not sure why, but it did work. The second time through the process, I didn't have to do anything twice. I guess I worked out all of the wrinkles the first time.
I did this whole procedure twice. The first time, I made the mistake of inserting the Snow Leopard DVD and installing the included BootCamp drivers. Best I can tell, DO NOT DO THAT! After doing so, I could no longer get my mouse to work (Apple Magic Mouse) even though it had been working just fine during the entire install process before that point. After repeating this whole entire process and NOT installing BC 3.0 drivers, everything else seems to be working now. I suppose that the Win7 install itself has the drivers for the Apple MM and other newer input devices that did not exist back when OSX SL was new.
And during a normal W7 install, it is normal for the computer to restart and boot from the drive being installed from. However, the first time the computer restarts, it will try and boot off of the thumb drive again, which will result in an attempt at a second installation of W7. It is vital that at that first restart, you pull out the thumb drive.
Also note that instead of just automatically starting up from the new W7 BC volume, the computer will hang UNLESS you hold down the option key and select the Windows volume at startup. You must do this EVERY time until you also do so and boot into OS X and then go into the Startup Disk system preference pane and select the Windows volume as your startup volume. I did that only after completing my W7 install including all of the updates in Windows Update and all of the necessary restarts which are required during that process.
What you will not have is the usual Boot Camp tray icon which lets you select to restart into OS X from the windows start bar tray. I suppose that gets installed from the BC 3.0, which as I mentioned above is a no-no unless you either hate yourself, or you reeeally love the Windows 7 install process and have another 6 hours to blow.
So that's it. Feel free to steal, alter, amend this as needed. You may repost this on any and all fix-it sites, so long as you mention me when you do so. Hope this saves someone the wasted time I spent. This is great for using an "old" machine as a Windows box for simple things.
Please let me know if this helps anyone. Thanks, and sorry for the long post.
SpikeDDS
spikedds@gmail.com
