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I'm trying to boot my Mac mini with a USB-connected Mavericks boot disk.

Holding down option when I restart gives me the choice of selecting either my main disk (Macintosh HD) or the boot disk (Install OS X Mavericks). When I select the boot disk, I'm taken to my Macintosh HD desktop anyway. It behaves as if I never selected the boot disk.

This happens with two different Mavericks install drives, one of which has been confirmed to work on other machines.

Partition map scheme for both drives is GUID and formatted to Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

Update: This is a Macmini2,1

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    Exactly which Mac mini model do you have? Use System Profiler to find the "MacMiniX,Y" identifier. I suspect your Mac mini is too old or otherwise unsupported by Mavericks.
    – Spiff
    Mar 19, 2014 at 18:05

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Your Mac mini is a 2007 model that maxed out at OS X Lion 10.7.5. It does not support Mavericks (10.9.x) or even Mountain Lion (10.8.x).

OS X installer disks are based on the same OS they install. That is, when you boot from a Mavericks install disk, you're booting a stripped down version of Mavericks. That's why your Mac mini isn't able to boot from that install disk.

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