Chosen Solution

Hi guys, I’m working on a Mac mini mid 2010 model that stopped booting. I found that the hard disk was going bad and replaced it with an SSD.

I have tried installing:

  1. High Sierra
  2. Low Sierra
  3. El Capitan All of which end of failing either before or after the initial installation (before it reboots and continues) with an error that the operating system could not be installed, but it usually does not point to any specific error, just says something like try again. If I install OSX 10.9 (mavericks), it works fine except at a certain point, the updates will not work. It tries, but eventually reboots and gives me a message about the updates not working. The computer originally had been working with 10.10 installed, so I want to at least get that far and make sure the photos app gets installed so they can view their photos library. I can not run a diagnostic on this mac mini. When I hold D, it says not available. Any ideas?

The High Sierra install attempt messed you up. I fought with this for 3 weeks, replaced several drives before I figured it out. It has installed APFS formatting. I even called Apple on my 2012 13” MacBook Pro. I could only go to Mavericks, anything above gave me kernel panics. Of course they didn’t tell me. This caused me days of work, about $600 in new drives and a lot of unhappy customers. It does this on SSD and SSHD drives. This goes along with other things Apple is doing to put third party upgrade and repairmen out of business. So: A: format it it APFS and stay with High Sierra or B. Reformat it GUID and stay with Sierra or earlier. I tried Mohave, but I did try the Beta and then it would not even see my external GUID USB formatted disk that I had just done the install from. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208033