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Repair guides, disassembly, and troubleshooting information for the third main redesign of Apple's popular Mac mini small form factor desktop PC, released October 2024. Features M4 and M4 Pro SoCs and a minimum of 16 GB of unified memory.

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Upgrading Storage / restore step

I have a question about upgrading the storage on the new Mac Mini M4. I bought the base model. I have the 2T SSD card upgrade on the way from store.m4-ssd.com. I haven’t even turned on the mini yet. I am confident that I can switch out the SSD physically. But I am unclear about how to get the 2T SSD card to work. I don’t have an extra Mac lying around to use Apple Configurator. I do have a Surface Pro running windows. Can I restore the Mac mini from iTunes? The surface has 2 x USB-C® with USB 4.0 / Thunderbolt 4. So I would just have to download iTunes, run iTunes when I and connect the Mac mini to the surface pro, and turn on the mini in DFU mode. Do I have these steps right?

Or is the only way to do this is with another Mac?

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The required method is using the Apple macOS tool Configurator tool from a second Mac connected via a USB-C Thunderbolt compliant cable. Time to find a friend with a M series Mac who can help you out.

Reference:

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As an alternative, if you have a Linux box lying around you can build the idevicerestore project. I used the same SSD from m4-ssd.com and used the idevicerestore project to flash the drive. Some distros have the binary present but I found the the version distributed did not detect the newer M4 models. After building from source the M4 was recognized and I was able to flash.

https://github.com/libimobiledevice/idev...

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Sorry they won’t work here. Apple uses a serialization strategy which requires access to multiple chips within the system, similar to how the iPhone is protected.

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Leanna Keightley crwdns2934231:0crwdne2934231:0
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