reverse hackintosh PC boot drive boots into Windows 10 on 2009 Mac Mini

[ChiliDog]

So this is weird. I decided to upgrade the Boot Drive in my 2009 Mac Mini to a Samsung SATA SSD.  I figured that the Mac system BIOS was still in there somewhere so I thought I would try and see if Disk Utility would be accessable so I could format the drive

 

Next thing I know I'm looking at the Windows splash screen with a spinning wheel and then that "Updating your computer, don't turn it off" screen comes up.

 

Well, son-of-a-bitch.  The thing restarts AND BOOTS INTO WINDOWS 10?!

 

I didn't do anything special or weird to the computer or the disk.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  This all came about, in part, because I didn't want to even do it right!

 

Am I tripping or is this really weird?

[Crunchy Dragon]

Macs, to my knowledge, do not have a BIOS in the sense that most other PCs do.

[Egon3]

I'm sure this was a nice surprise! This can be expected with Intel-based Macs. Apple actually supports this functionality too with what they call Boot Camp. When I got a Macbook back in 2013, one of the first things I did was set up boot camp and dual boot my Mac with both OS X and Windows. Boot Camp is no longer supported with the newer M1 Macs though.

 

Macs don't have a BIOS that you can access or change settings so what you were attempting wouldn't be possible, unfortunately. I don't believe the old Intel Macs have the internet recovery functionality the newer ones do (but someone please correct me if I'm wrong).

 

If you're looking for help to wipe the drive, I'd recommend one of the following options:

1. Put a drive with MacOS back in and plug in the Windows drive as a secondary drive. You can use disk utility built into MacOS to wipe the drive. With multiple possible boot drives attached, you can hold ALT on the Apple logo boot screen to pick your boot drive.
2. Use a MacOS install USB to boot into the installer, where you can access disk utility from the menu to format the drive.
3. Use a Windows installer USB to delete the partitions and reformat it.

[OldAndGrizzled]

On 5/17/2023 at 10:35 AM, Egon3 said:

I don't believe the old Intel Macs have the internet recovery functionality the newer ones do (but someone please correct me if I'm wrong).

Some of the old Intel Macs have the ability to boot off the Internet. You can hold Command-R and it'll try to connect to an open WiFi network or go through an Ethernet connection get you a basic installer. If you have the original hard drive, depending on which Mac you have, it should have a "Recovery Partition" on it that will bootstrap you into an installer.

 

As for the Samsung drive, you hold down the Option key on boot and it should present you with a list of drives the computer sees as valid boot devices. It's worth doing to see if you can into a recovery boot state to reformat that Windows drive.