Mac Mini
 

A friend who is emigrating has downsized his collection of computer kit, and kindly donated a mac mini to me.

It is a well spec'd device and I have some project plans that I intend to use the hardware for, which may require me to remove the Mac OS software, but at a point in time I may want to restore it or run its native OS as a VM on the mac mini itself.

I have never had cause to delve into the technical side of Macs, but understand their OS is based around *nix, which is something I am comfortable working with. Presently the device is running El Capitan, haveing followed an upgrade path from its originally licensed version of the OS.

If I wanted to do something else with this machine, then at a later point cleanly install El Capitan, where can I obtain the installation media from?

Unit is currently running a mirrored pair of 256 SSD disks, in the worst case I can swap these out, but I would still like to know that I can rebuild the device if I needed to.

Help from those who know how would be appreciated.

Before you remove IOS, grab a copy of El Capitan from the AppStore and create your flash drive installer , then do as you please and if you want to revert just reload el capitan from installer.

As simple as that - thanks Si.

There's also a recovery partition that will do a fresh install, have a look while you're setting up.

To rebuild your Mac in under 3 minutes have a look at AutoDMG

https://coolestguidesontheplanet.com...using-autodmg/

Guide is for 10.10.x but procedure is the same just newer versions.

To go further, automate user account etc:

https://github.com/MagerValp/AutoDMG/wiki