Mac Mini HDD Replacement?

boardordi3

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So I bought a used Mac Mini the other day, (first gen, A1103), with a bad hard drive off of craigslist in hopes to fix it. I brought it home, cracked it open, and looked at the hard drive.
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I found I have almost the exact same one in an older computer, a Compaq.
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I guess what I'm trying to figure out is how best to reformat the latter HDD, so I can put a fresh install of OS X on it, but I have heard that it is not as simple as that because NTFS is not compatible with Mac, etc.

Any ideas on the best course of action?
 
I might be wrong here.... but you SHOULD be able to used the Disk Utility in the OSX installed to re-format the disk to a different filesystem.
 
IIRC, the OS X install CD formats the HDD for you. I'd DBAN the drive first, just to be sure that the NTFS doesn't get in the way.

The only other thing is that my plan was to buy the Snow Leopard upgrade (the $30 one) as I was told that it would be able to perform a clean install on a clean HDD. If I did, then I should be able to just put the hard drive in, and run the OS installer, formatting the disc automatically?
 
Well that's no good... Thanks for the heads up, almost went and bought it.

So lets say I get the compatible OS, then should I be able to put the windows-formatted hard drive in, and boot from flash drive to format and install OSX on it?
 
Boot from flash drive? You would boot from the install CD.

I'd DBAN the disk though. IDK what Mac OS will do if it detects that you're trying to install it to a windows formatted disk.
 
I called Apple and they said they would send me the 10.4 and 10.5 restore disks, not bad. So basically what you're saying is make a bootable copy of DBAN, run it with the windows hard drive in the mac? And then run the OS installer? Or DBAN it on my windows machine, because that might prove to be more difficult than the former option.
 
I don't see why you're DBAN'ing the drive. OSX might not recognize the filesystem, but it WILL see the disk, and it should let you format it...
 
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