Proper Tools; macOS Recovery; macOS Upgrade Path

The circa-2011 Crucial M4 SSD in the 2012 Core i5 Mac mini I picked up used (and cheap!) for the office failed. It was running really slowly the night before, the next morning no application would open (the icons would just bounce in the dock, forever), and when I finally lost patience and power-cycled it, I got the dreaded blinking question-mark folder. Oh well. Picked up a Crucial MX500; 1TB seems to be the price-capacity sweet spot ($90). (Side note, the 256GB drive I was replacing was $299.99!)

Swapping the same drive into the 2012 Mac mini server was a non-event, I could slip the old 500GB spinning rust mechanism right out. But the base model desktop was another story. Turns out I needed a simple, inexpensive, Mac Mini Logic Board Removal Tool to scoot the motherboard aside just enough for me to get the dead drive out. As long as I was ordering tools, I finally broke down and got a Wiha set. That, plus a set of cheap Chinese spudgers etc. I picked up a while ago (Kaisi Professional Electronics Opening Pry Tool Repair Kit), and I was all set. (The same kit should serve me well when I tackle a more ambitious project - swapping a logic board from a 2015 Core i7 11" MacBook Air into a 2014 unit - in a day or two.)

I’ve been using a hodge-podge of tools I’ve picked up along the way, including these cute little Picquic Teeny Turner drivers I found at Fry’s [RIP]. Having a real, quality, tool set, though? For teh win.

Once properly equipped, swapping in the new Crucial took all of about 10 minutes, working slowly and carefully and occasionally augmenting my aging eyeballs with a lighted magnifying glass (I picked it up to assist with threading the needle on my sewing machine (which I got because of all the instructional videos; looks like the 3337 is the replacement?), but it works extremely well here, too). The only additions I’d make to the iFixit instructions: (1) You really don’t have to disconnect the wireless antennae. (2) I used a sticky shipping label to hold the new drive up so I could insert the two little bolts hanging off the side into the holes ready to receive them, I couldn’t figure out any way to get it properly installed.

Operating on the patient with Wiha tools

Benefit of a magnifying glass

Some of the tools I used to use

Once installed, I booted the machine up holding down ⌘⌥R to recover it over the Internet with the most recent macOS version that will (according to Apple) run on this box. (If I’d wanted to be particularly masochistic,  ⌘⌥⇧R would have reinstalled Mountain Lion, an OS I loved ten years ago, but which really isn’t usable today).

Over to Mr. Macintosh to download a Big Sur installer (and if you do happen to be on Mountain Lion, you can install Sierra or High Sierra (scroll down) as an intermediate step (see below)). Prepped a USB flash drive with OpenCore Legacy Patcher and Bob’s my uncle.

% open ~/Downloads/InstallAssistant.pkg

% sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Big\ Sur.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/LEXAR

Patched the EFI partition of the USB drive with OpenCore Legacy Patcher and rebooted holding down the Option ⌥ key and upgraded the Catalina 10.15.7 install to Big Sur 11.6.6. Easy.

You can’t leap from Mountain Lion straight to Big Sur. Apple helpfully put together a map for which Mac OS / macOS versions a particular operating system can upgrade to:

• Snow Leopard (10.6.8) can directly upgrade to Lion (10.7), Mountain Lion (10.8), Mavericks (10.9), Yosemite (10.10), or El Capitan (10.11).
  
• Lion (10.7) can upgrade to Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan, or macOS Sierra (10.12).
• Mountain Lion can upgrade to Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan, Sierra, High Sierra (10.13), or Mojave (10.14).
• Mavericks can upgrade to Yosemite, El Capitan, Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina (10.15), or Big Sur (macOS 11).