Installing Displaylink driver on another system HD

[saudor]

you may be right in that the mac mini might use a 2.5 inch SATA laptop drive vs the 3.5inch desktop in the mac pro.

If that is the case (I think it is), you'll end up needing a 3.5 inch SATA to USB enclosure

On the other hand, you can put in your mac mini drive into the mac pro AFTER you install the driver onto your mac mini if all you need to do is access files on the mac pro. this assumes that your mac mini uses a standard laptop drive and not something that is soldered onto the motherboard

[sultanmakende]

hi Saudor,
so I managed to install Mavericks on an external drive via the Mac Mini by booting up while holding shift + option +command +R and logging into my apple account, which installed the mavericks OS via the internet.
However as I suspected, it installed the software specific to the 2014 Mac Mini hardware and the 2006 MacPro would not boot from that disk.
Actually I find it rather silly that Displaylink installer won't allow the driver to be installed on an externally mounted boot / OS drive.
I wish the developers would do an upgrade to allow this as it must be a common problem.

[saudor]

That's really odd. There's a ton of cloning software like CarbonCopy, SuperDuper (i use this one) that can be used to boot a mac from an external drive despite it being from another computer.
I guess at this point, your option might be to plug in the mac pro disk into your mini and access files that way

Actually...
http://www.everymac.com/systems/appl...2.0-specs.html

If that is the one you have, that explains it. 2006 mac Pros are only supported till 10.7.5 and of course Mac minis dont run 10.7.5. But i'd go for a new GPU if you can find it. DL hardware while nice for basic reading and light internet, it's not so good for heavy duty work. Your mac mini will likely provide better performance over the 2006 under those conditions.