No, OS X Yosemite will not delete your data. I installed it and it did not delete my data. Just in case, you might want to copy the most important files onto a flash drive or put them into the Cloud. This way, if something glitches, then your most important files will still save.
All Apple is willing to say is "Fall 2014".
Harry Potter may be able to help...
"Other data" refers to as any miscellaneous data that may not necessarily be of the common data types or formats that OS X recognizes. If anything, check your home directory and see if anything needs to be backed up, moved, or deleted.
No it cannot
erase it
Yes, Surely it will remove everything on hard drive. Formatting a hard drive means to remove everything on hard drive. If you are formatting only a specific drive like C:\ or D:\ then the data in only that drive will be removed.
It depends on the age of your Mini. New models run Yosemite and will run newer OS's. You might download MacTracker. It's an application that will tell you most everything you need to know about every Mac made.
The best hard drive eraser program for PCs is Darik's Boot and Nuke which can be found at: www.dban.org. If you are using a Macintosh, then use OS X's Disk Utility to erase hard drives. In the utility you can set options to securely erase the data.
You cannot bypass the "Firmware" password, you HAVE to erase and reinstall the OS if you forgot the "Firmware" password.
If you have OS installation media use overwrite program like ErAce and reinstall OS. ErAce can be found from erace.it
You can Format all drives. While formatting drives, when you format C Drive all the ntldr files and important OS files will get deleted. Or you can reboot the computer.
reload windows or your favorite operateing system.