Internet recovery not working on iMac mini

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Hello,

hope someone can help me a bit. I have purchased a old 2011 Mac mini without a hard drive and now trying to get it to work. I have already installed a hard drive and now trying to get mac os to work on it.

I downloaded Mojave and made a boot able USB stick but that isn't accepted by the mac, when i try to use USB as boot device i just get the circle with the line in it.
When i try to start internet recovery it starts up, connects to check eligibility and the goes nuts and stops. It is trying to download Lion.

Any ideas whart to try? The USB stick i created is OK, it works fine on my imac to boot from.
TIA
 
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Your Mac's Specs
2008 Mac Pro 3,1 (2 x 2.8GHz Quad-core Xeon) / 16GB RAM / ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT / El Capitan 10.11.6
AFAIK (others here may know better), Mojave is not supported on the 2011 Mac Mini:

macOS 10.14 Mojave Drops Support for Many Older Machines - MacRumors

That's officially, though. My 2008 Mac Pro isn't supposed to be able to run anything later than El Capitan, but apparently some people have succeeded in patching it to run High Sierra! Such patched installs are only for dedicated tinkerers, though, and strictly at your own risk.
 

IWT


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Your Mac's Specs
M2 Max Studio Extra, 32GB memory, 4TB, Sonoma 14.4 Apple 5K Retina Studio Monitor
@dosada

When you use Internet Recovery, this downloads the Operating System (OS) with which the Mac shipped. Hence why it offered Lion.

This is in contrast to Recovery Mode accessed via an operating internal HD when it will usually offer to download the OS currently on your Mac. This obviously doesn't apply to you as you don't have a working internal HD.

And Horsa is correct. This is a quote from Apple Discussions: "macOS Mojave will be available this fall as a free software update for Macs introduced in mid-2012 or later, plus 2010 and 2012 Mac Pro models with recommended Metal-capable graphics cards." (Link: Is Mac mini Mid-2011 obsolete re. Mojave? - Apple Community)

So you will not get macOS Mojave to download on to your Mac mini 2011. It should take macOS High Sierra or earlier if you can find these.

Ian
 
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Thanks guys, trying to download high sierra now and see how i go. Will update the thread once done. Maybe someone else will need to know the results for future issues of their own.
 
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Big thanks guys. Worked a charm. Downloaded High Sierra from the App store and worked perfectly fine.
 

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