Desra Blog

Mac mini 2,1 devices are tricky, they are 64bit, but have a 32bit EFI.  booting a usb to install windows isn't going to work. my internal cdrom drive is faulty, so can't use that an external cdrom won't install either. The easiest way to install it, is to boot the mac mini into target disk mode (hold T on boot).  Then connect a firewire cable to another system.  The internal disk in the mini will now show up as a disk on this other system. create a 4GB NTFS primary partition. copy the contents of windows 10 x32 cdrom onto it make the partition active with diskpart (select disk X/select partion X/active) put a bootsector on it. from cdrom \boot\bootsect.exe /nt60 y: reboot mini, and it will install windows from the internal disk. thanks to  https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/619313/clean-install-windows-directly-from-the-hard-disk-drive/ drivers are fun, get apple ir, bluetooth etc from bootcamp 4.0.4326 and extract the sigmatel audio drivers, and fo

Mac mini 2,1 devices are tricky, they are 64bit, but have a 32bit EFI.  booting a usb to install Freebsd isn't going to work. my internal cdrom drive is faulty, so can't use that an external cdrom won't install either. The easiest way to install it, is to boot the mac mini into target disk mode (hold T on boot).  Then connect a fireware cable to another system.  The internal disk in the mini will now show up as a disk on this other system. install virtualbox and setup raw disk access to the firewire drive.  install freebsd in virtualbox, which is therefore writing at a raw level to the disk in the mini.  complete the install, power cycle the mini and it should boot into freebsd. everything worked for me, graphics were a problem though with freebsd, it wouldn't detect the DVI.  digging around, this fixed it installing port graphics/drm-fbsd12.0-kmod and adding        kld_list="/boot/modules/drm.ko /boot/modules/i915kms.ko"  to the top of rc.conf,