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How to Make a Mac Boot any Disk

For some time now, I’ve had a misbehaving Mac in the shop. It’s a pretty good box – 4 processor cores, 12 GB of RAM, a terabyte of disk. But, it’s not been playing ball at all well.

When given to me the box had MacOS on it (I forget which version) but it needed to be rebuilt. The Apple folks were wayyyyyy less than helpful, so I abandoned the idea of rebuilding it as a Mac.

Linux was the first attempt, and that went fairly well. I got CentOS 6.9 into the box with little trouble. However, once running CentOS, I could not get it to boot from any other DVD. I would get this weird prompt where it would ask me to “Select CD-ROM Boot Type”, but would take nothing whatsoever for an answer.

After a great many attempts to get it to boot off the internal DVD drive, desperation became the mother of invention. I grabbed a USB DVD burner and put the disk that wouldn’t boot into it. Booted up, first try!

I then installed ESXi-6.0 on the box, having determined that 6.5 won’t install. I installed it to a thumb drive, and sure enough the Mac booted off the thumb drive as pretty as you please.

So, it appears that to make a Mac behave, you should boot it via USB. You’re welcome.

Epilog: after more experience booting macs, it’s clear now that while macs will boot to a CD, they won’t boot to DVDs for some reason. I think the reason is that mac install discs are not booted to. They are run, presumably from within Free-BSD. But, I’m not a mac person, so take that with a grain of salt.

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