Mountain Lion on MacMini 1,1 Possble?

Question

Is it possible to install Mountain Lion on a MacMini 1,1 (Mid 2007)?

Are you looking for someone to help interpret whether that Mac meets the minimum specs or is this more about whether and how to hack the installer and see whether the OS even boots on that hardware once you've figured out how to bypass the installation check that rules out a CPU that old?
Eh - I'll just answer it for the simple case and let you ask a follow up question if you are more interested in whether someone has hacked the installer to attempt an install on a 2007 Mac mini.

bmike · Answer 1 · 2012-10-26 13:55:06Z

Not without modifying the installer and dealing with any issues / drivers / recompiling some of the code as needed.

The list of Macs that Apple checks before installing is on the requirements page:

As that link could easily change within a year's time, here for posterity are the models listed as supported on Mountain Lion:

I did it... i've installed, but the graphics just dont work... it looks like the GMA945 drivers are 32bits only, and the new kernel is 64bits only. Any ideas?
The most promising idea would be to try to run the new OS in a virtual machine in hopes that the drivers would work better with a layer of separation between the OS and the hardware.

1 Answer