Mac question update

[ffutures]

I was asked for more details - it's a 1.83 ghz Core 2 Duo with 1GB RAM

Just tried booting it off a memory stick that allegedly has OS X 10.7 and it doesn't work, but the stick is old and may be damaged. I have 10.4 (Tiger), 10.5 (Leopard) and 10.6 (Snow Leopard) on DVD-ROM - they're versions that will work on any compatible mac, not the "shipped with an individual machine" grey disks.

Would it be possible to do this sort of DVD to USB transfer on my MacBook Pro (running 10.13) without messing up the hard drive, or would I be better off doing it on the windows 7 box.

Update - 7.55 Tuesday - I tried to get a memory stick install to work and failed (probably did something wrong setting up the stick), but decided to try one of the old Mac DVD drives I have with a Firewire to IDE interface from an old external hard drive. And amazingly it worked pretty well once I found a drive that was still reading reliably - got Snow Leopard installed in about an hour, I'm now getting the updates downloaded from Apple and installing them. Hopefully I'll get the thing on sale in the next day or two.

Comments

[ffutures]

I think the memory stick I have with 10.7 came with your Macbook when I bought it a few years ago, and it really didn't seem to want to boot from it - it gave me a big "STOP" sign rather than booting - so I'm guessing it'll have to be Snow Leopard. I really don't want to get into upgrading it anyway, I just want to wipe it and sell it on.

[autopope]

Your best bet is to make a bootable stick using Snow Leopard ... or to buy/beg/borrow a SuperDrive and just boot the DVD directly.

Turns out you can make a bootable macOS USB stick on Windows, too, if you have a Windows PC with a DVD drive and a USB port.

[ffutures]

Had a couple of goes with a USB stick and it really didn't seem to want to work, so I've put together a firewire DVD drive (old firewire hard disk casing with an old DVD Drive) and it booted OK and seems to be working so far, about ten minutes into a 30 minute install (yeah, right). Not exactly fast since the data is going through Firewire 400 ports at both ends, but hopefully I'll get there in the end.

[ffutures]

Took about an hour but it worked!