Just wanted to let all mini owners know that this can be done,
the nuc image boots and runs fine on the minies. without any changes or bootloaders.
well. no wifi or bluetooth…
just open balenaetcher to write the NUT image to the SSD and insert it. boot and enjoy. thats it.
i restored my snapshot and it is working fine. i use motioneye with 4 kameraes and it just runs great
Do you reckon it’d work with a 2006 Mini that’s been upgraded from 1.66 core duo to a 2.0 core 2 duo? Might blow the dust off it if so.
I would think so. I actually have one. I will try during the week.
Thanks, would be nice to give the old girl a job again and would be full circle as started my HA journey many years ago on it but had to give up as everything new and exciting was specifically based around the Pi then and rarely worked properly if at all on the Mac.
i just tried my 2.0 ghz core 2 duo mini and it wont see the nuc drive. i think the efi boot at 32bit is the problem - the newer minies have 64 efi boot. but i think you could use an bootloader to overcome this. refind might work: https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/
Bum, that spoilt other things I could do with it too. Thanks for trying and the suggestion though, I’ll have a read.
i tried with refind and no luck. seems that it wont run on the 32 bit efi machine. so you have to use the silver minies for this.
Thanks for trying, much appreciated as I was a bit confused about how it worked. Back to the cupboard 
you could install linux on it and then supervised ha?
To be honest I’m perfectly happy with it running in a VM on my Microserver and don’t miss the old days of having to maintain it under the hood too, that’s why you’re initial discovery piqued my interest, would have been best of both worlds. Thanks again for trying it out.
I’m gonna giver a shot with some mid 2011 mini’s! Sounds too easy but i like that!
I am also thinking to do that but you said no bluetooth or wifi ? why is that ?
How can I boot it from internet storage to don’t depend on the external ssd?
I’ve just resurrected and repurposed my Mac Mini 2010 based on your post.
However, mine had 2 x HDD, and I knew one to be failing. I removed it, and still booted to Mac OS, but the fan just turned on full speed and stayed that way.
I suspect it may have been linked to the temperature sensor on the drive?
Anyway, did you have fan issues? What did you do to correct it?
Reattach the temp sensor.
It’s separate on own wire
That makes sense. 2 drives and 3 temp sensors. I did not re-attach the third after drive removal.
Will do so tomorrow when I get the SSD.