Tinkering project

[OrdinaryPhil]

I recently picked up two A1181 macbooks for $1 each. At first I wasn't even sure they were worth the single Washington since they didn't come with chargers and I wasn't able to see if there was internal damage. But after a few hours of cleaning them up (And they REALLY needed a cleaning), I dug up an old MagSafe charger from my basement and go them both to turn on... they didn't have HDDs, but they both have 2x1GB DDR2. I found a few 500GB WD black HDDs in an old box and thought... maybe I can get these up and running.

Sadly - my first attempt was a failure. I wasn't able to get them to accept an install of OSX 10.7 Lion - which everymac indicates is the most current OS these little guys support. The bootable USB media shows up and I can select "EFI boot" from the menu, but it just fails after about 5 minutes and powers down.

The same thing happens if I try a 32bit install of Windows 10 using the same method.

I'm not super invested in this project, but I'd like to actually see if I can get this puppies to actually boot into an OS - otherwise I am out $2 and that just won't do, lol.

[OrdinaryPhil]

Udpate:

 

Apparently the firmware in macbooks of this age are quite fickle with USB booting. I don't actually own any USB 2.0 drives and they don't seem to understand what USB 3.x drives are. So much for "universal" serial bus eh?

Anyway, I called in a favor from a friend and got my hands a Snow Leopard CD - something of an relic at this point, and got it to successfully boot!

Part of me is a bit dissappointed with this. Snow Leopard was a terrible OS and I don't think I can coerce these old units into anything newer than that. While they should theoretically boot to Windows 10 - a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of DDR2 RAM is not going to be a great experience.

I briefly manged to get one of them to boot into Xubuntu which would be a perfectly fine OS for devices with lower end hardware (it's super lightweight), but it failed to detect the keyboard, Optical Drive, and display adapter, so it was lower resolution that I would have liked, and I had to connect an external keyboard. Not a good experience.