11-05-2011, 10:44 AM

My daughters mac mini (pre intel) won't install leopard (10.5) even though it seems to meet all system requirements. The only thing I could think of was that the system wasn't formatted correctly to upgrade from tiger to leopard. I erased the system but I used disc utility on the OSX 10.5 installer, and in retrospect that was dumb - I should have used the 10.4 installer. Now the computer won't accept 10.4 or earlier installation discs, apparently because the driver for those systems has been erased. I can boot with the 10.5 installation disc but it won't install. Is there a way around this mess I got myself into? I have an external hard drive I use for backups. Can I put the 10.4 installation software on that hard drive and use the external hard drive as the start-up disc? Will that do anything bad to the external drive which is partitioned for Mac and PC backup?

11-05-2011, 11:08 AM

Leopard should certainly install on that system. I don't think you're having a driver issue per se, but maybe one of using the wrong installation media.

One of the most common problems we see here that leads to installation issues is when people use the grey "System discs" to install to a machine they weren't originally bundled with. System discs are typically tailored to the machine they were sold with (or at the very least, that particular model line and revision).

What you need is a retail version of 10.5. This will be a black disc with the OS X 'X' logo on it. These can be expensive and hard to come by, since it's the latest version of OS X that the older PPC/non-Intel Macs can run and are in high demand.

11-05-2011, 11:22 AM

Thanks for the reply. I'll see if I can find a retail version of 10.5.