[osxrules]

I used to have an ibook and I had a copy of 10.3. I kept a backup of the discs that I used for booting with instead of the originals and they worked fine. I sold the originals with my ibook - they weren't specifically for the ibook though.

Now I bought a new Mac Mini and tried to boot from the discs. To my surprise, the Mini crashed at the Apple symbol. I tried to boot from my firewire drive and the disc showed up as a valid bootable disc but when I selected it and proceeded to boot, it went so far and then showed a big grey circle with a line through it like a no smoking sign without the cigarette.

The 10.3 DVD disc that came with my Mini booted just fine. Are the new Macs programmed to not boot copied discs?

[Applefreak01]

My guess the Mac Mini needs a version higher than 10.3 to boot. Like 10.3.7 or 10.3.8 for example. I'm not 100% sure on what version of Mac OS X the Mac Mini shipped with originally, now they ship with 10.4. So my guess is that the version of Mac OS X on the DVD is 10.3.x not 10.3 like the retail CD that you made your back-up from.

[tooki]

There's no copy protection, the disc you were trying to use was simply too old a version to run on a Mac mini.

tooki