Can I know the technical specifications of a Mac mini without an OS?

Question

I just bought a Mac mini 2011 to replace my iMac 2011 and want to make sure before I plug my Time Machine drive into it that the Mac mini's hard drive has the capacity I need.

I tried restarting it with the R key pressed, but it didn't work, it went to the install prompts.

Can I boot the Mac mini (which doesn't have an OS yet, so booting up prompts install steps) in a way to know what HD it has?

Answer 1

You’ve got a few options here:

1. Lookup the machine exact hard drive capacity by entering the serial number on the Every Mac website.

2. Boot the Mac Mini while holding down the ⌘ CommandR keys to enter recovery mode and then chose the Disk Utility option (normally at the bottom of the menu) this will show you the capacity of the installed hard drive.

I’ve never tried it before but I would also expect Time Machine to warn you if you attempt to restore your backups to a disk that’s too small.

Answer 2

If your hard drive is blank, you cannot use regular Recovery Mode (⌘ CommandR) because there won't be a recovery partition from which to boot

The 2011 Mac mini, if the firmware was upgraded can boot from Internet Recovery using the keyboard combination ⌘ Command⌥ OptionR.

Once there, you can use Disk Utility (accessed from the menu bar) to validate the size of your disk or using Terminal, issue the command

$ diskutil info disk0 | grep "Disk Size"

Answer 3

Boot any Mac to target disk mode and it shows up on supported buses as an external hard drive.

• Hold T at boot, connect via thunderbolt
• https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201462