I say try because I do not believe the method used to install the previous Ubuntu has been established. You can use this USB installer to try to install an EFI booting Ubuntu on your 2009 Mac mini. You should be able to use the current version of Etcher on your MBP running Big Sur to create a USB EFI bootable Ubuntu 20.04 Installer. Apple's instructions for downloading and creating the USB installer are given here. You could also try installing El Capitan from USB. You may also try burning the ISO to a DVD.

The procedure for acquiring and creating a USB bootable Snow Leopard installer is given here. Your question does not address why you can not use the Ubuntu USB installer prepared using the instructions posted here or here.īased on the information posted in your question, I am not entirely sure you can install Snow Leopard 10.6. However, rEFInd and also be used to EFI or BIOS boot Ubuntu. The latest versions of Ubuntu can be installed on Macs to be EFI booted using the Mac Startup Manager. Your question do not entirely explain how you originally installed Ubuntu. I can create a bootable USB there with Etcher or in a Debian VM I have here. I have a working Big Sur MBP sitting here where I am writing from. Long story short, how can I create a bootable USB stick out of the downloaded Mountain Lion DMG? I tried with dmg2iso but etcher tells me that there is no bootable partition on the iso. I have no OSX DVD here (Those minis have a disk drive, yes). Switching into text only terminal with ATL + F2 fails too so no way to communicate to the system, needs. I see a Ubuntu spinwheel screen but then it does not load unity. After a reboot, linux does not complete the boot. I installed the 3rd party wifi driver that worked but the NVidia driver failed. What I previously did was to install rEFInd and Ubuntu 20.04 where I entirely formatted the whole disk to xfs (or so, don't remember). I hence downloaded the Mountain Lion dmg and trying to build a USB installer stick. However, after several attempts the main disk is now fully wiped and I can not re-install osX anymore. I have been messing around with my Mac Mini 2009 that I would like to setup as a standalone Ubuntu box.

Ubuntu for mac mini