Roundabout, sort of.

OS X that came with the Mini installed and booted from the external Firewire drive.

Using the Firewire OS, which I'm gonna leave on there for emergency use, I was able to see the ex-Dell drive and format it for Mac.

Then I used the Tiger upgrade disc. It saw the Firewire OS and let me clean install right to the ex-Dell drive, so, all is well again.

Kind of dislike how they make the install so simple, that if something goes wrong, you really have no recourse. If I did not have a firewire drive to install OS X on, not sure what I could have done.

OS X never would boot from a disc, only the installer program, so I would have been unable to format my drive from Windows to Mac.

OK, I had a similar issue with an iBook booting 10.3 CD and a new 7K60. But from the installer menu you can invoke disk utility, quick format, then boot again from the DVD and it should work.

Yup. The installer will never let you reformat a partition that is not already formatted properly for Mac OS X. That's why you do like lagarto said and reformat using Disk Utility. The installer will then see the cleanly-formatted drive.

tooki

How would that happen though?

I pulled the drive out of my Dell laptop. There was no way to format it, as the mini can only hold one drive. When I took my OEM mini drive out and put the Dell drive in, the best I could do was to get the OS X install CD to fire up. OS X itself never booted from the CD, only the install program. There were no menus or anyway to access things from OS X.

That's why I had to get crafty and install OS X on a firewiredrive and boot to that so I could then go back and format the drive. If I did not have an external drive, I'm not sure what I could have done.

FWIW, Windoze, being the cancerous OS that it is, was only too happy to take whatever drive I placed in the Dell and blast it with NTFS.

My Panther CDs would not boot my mini. And my Tiger upgrade would only work on a drive that already had some form of OS X on it.

All I had was the OEM grey Mac Mini OS X install CD.

Maybe I missed it, but I saw no way to invoke the Disk Utility.

sodamn, what they're saying is you can access disk utility from within the OS X Installer.

Exactly! Although it's not immediately obvious, the installer just displays no target disks. I'd just reassembled the iBook, thought I might have connected the disk incorrectly, and since I had no external drive, for a minute I screamed and cursed. Then saw disk utility on the installer menu and run it... ahh, sigh of relief !!

NO Mac OS X discs boot you to the desktop.

But you did miss it.

In Panther and earlier install discs, once the Installer comes up, you can go to the menu "Installer" and choose Open Disk Utility.

In Tiger install discs, once you've selected the language you want to use, there is a whole "Utilities" menu, and one of the items is Disk Utility.


tooki

P.S. If the Tiger upgrade disc is the same as the ones for Panther and Jaguar, there's a way to make a copy of the disc that doesn't require a previous version to be installed. On Jag and Panther upgrade discs, there was a hidden file called "CheckForOSX", and deleting it and then burning a new copy would make it stop checking! Note also that the upgrade discs always give you the option of doing an "erase and install", which gives you an identical result to using the full installer on a newly-erased disk.

Cool. Good to know.

I always do a clean install, so... that is the goal.

Nice trick on the CheckForOSX thing.

I did the same exact thing! I got the Hitachi 7.2k drive and installed it in my Mac mini. When I popped in the Tiger install disk, and no installable drive! I then finally poked around the menus and found the Disk Utility menu. Partition, Format and then the drive was ready for install.

I'm so used to working on Windows/Linux machines, I panicked for a second not knowing what to do or how to access those functions. Conveniently placed however by Apple, just took a little looking.

I've thought about doing this to my Mini, but I don't want to waste my current OSX setuup.

I have a LaCie 250gb USB drive, can I use the disk utility to backup my current copy to the USB, install the new drive and them import the backup back to the Mini? Thus giving me all my settings and files and stuff on the better drive?

You can backup to your external drive. I would try to back it up as an image and then restore that image afterward using Disk Utility, or you could go the CCC route.