external optical drive for mac mini 2011

EXTERNAL OPTICAL DRIVE FOR MAC MINI 2011 INSTALL
EXTERNAL OPTICAL DRIVE FOR MAC MINI 2011 PC

For me it was something like D for the USB and F for the DVD, but it will vary for everyone Note the drive letters for the USB and the newly inserted DVD.

EXTERNAL OPTICAL DRIVE FOR MAC MINI 2011 PC

Insert the Windows 7 DVD into the Windows 7 PC that you’ve been working on Type assign and press Enter - Windows will indicate that a new drive has just been plugged in The progress should be shown as a percentage in the command prompt Type format fs=ntfs and press Enter - this will take some time. Type create partition primary and press Enter A list of currently connected storage devices will be listed, starting with Disk 0.įind what Disk number is assigned to the USB drive (for me it was 1) and type select disk 1 (replacing the number with your own) and press Enter Type list disk into the command prompt and press Enter. Type diskpart into the command prompt and press Enter Open the command prompt with administrator rights Plug a USB drive into a computer with Windows 7 already installed However, I am still listing them here because these are the steps that I know worked for me. In retrospect, some of them seem like they may have been unnecessary. Note: I am going to list exact steps that I took to get this working. Just so you know, 99% of this was put together in the article I linked to above.

EXTERNAL OPTICAL DRIVE FOR MAC MINI 2011 INSTALL

This probably isn’t the last time that I’ll need to install Windows on a Mac Mini, so I figured I’d write everything down just to make sure I have a personal set of instructions to refer to.

Some of the steps ended up differing slightly, so instead of trying to outline what I had to change here and potentially making things confusing, I decided to re-write the steps. But I did find this CNET article that supposedly outlined steps to install Windows 7 from a USB on a last-gen MacBook Air, so I figured this should also work for any Mac. Both were said to be impossible or nearly so by most.

The two remaining choices were remote disk or installing Windows 7 with Bootcamp from a USB. I’m paying for the Mac Mini - why should I dish out more money to make it do what I want? Most things I found online suggested buying an external optical drive, but that seemed backwards to me out of principle. As someone who needs to primarily run Windows 7 on this PC, I wasn’t sure what the best way to install this would be. The one annoyance with the new Mac Mini was the lack of an optical drive.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I recently upgraded my old Mac Mini (by “old” I mean purchased at the end of June) to a new Mac Mini.

External optical drive for mac mini 2011