Mac mini's mind molten

February 1, 2009 12:36 PM

Mac meltdown: my wife's Mac Mini seems to have bitten the dust. Before I take it in for repair, I want to query the hivemind for anything I might be overlooking. Details on symptoms and efforts so far within.

Last night, her mac shut itself off for no apparent reason. It was idle at the time. It's a G4 Mini, a little over 3 years old.

Today we try to boot it. Blank gray screen (no Apple logo). I try booting into open firmware. That works. I do a reset-all and then boot-mac. Blank gray screen again.

I decide to re-install the OS from the DVD. I attempt to boot to the DVD. I get the "prohibitory sign" (circle with slash) and it sits like that for a loooong time, but eventually the first install screen appears. As I step forward with the install process, I discover it's not registering the hard drive as present. I launch Disk Utility from there, and discover that the disk (purportedly) has no partitions. After much gnashing of teeth, I decide to create a partition (nuking whatever might have been on it).

That seems to work. Even before the process is complete, her computer becomes visible over the network to my machine.

I proceed with the OS reinstallation on what should be a virgin drive. It chugs away for a little while without making any progress, and then I get the multilingual kernel-panic screen. At that point I throw in the towel and throw myself upon the mercy of my fellow mefites.

At this point it seems like a hardware issue to me. Perhaps it would be cured by a new hard drive, but I don't want to spend money on that without knowing for sure.

posted by adamrice to computers & internet (6 comments total)

I'd say that it's either the HD itself or the hard drive controller on the logic board. The former is much less expensive repair than the latter, of course. How to determine:

- put a new HD in the Mac mini. If you continue to get Kernel Panics and strange behavior, then it points to a problem with the logic board (probably HD controller, HD bus).

- it might be worthwhile to boot from a Firewire HD with and OS installed on it and run the system for awhile (overnight, doing number crunching, or fractals creations). If it runs fine from a FWHD, then it's more evidence that it's the internal HD that's failed.

2.5" IDE HDs are not expensive nowadays, but yes, weigh the cost of any repair on this older and underpowered Mac. OWC has generally good deals on 2.5" HDs.
posted by mrbarrett.com at 12:46 PM on February 1, 2009

I think the first course of action would be to install OSX to an external drive and see how it runs, including MrBarrett's idea to run a stress test. If that works, then open the Mac Mini and replace the drive. (I hear that's a lot of work, so that's why I'm suggesting the non-invasive maneuver first.) Of course, an external drive has its own controller, so if the logic board is shot, it's not a good repair, so make sure the 2.5 laptop drive can be returned.

Then again, if it's just a machine for really light work, you might be able to put up with using an external drive for the rest of its lifetime.
posted by mccarty.tim at 1:23 PM on February 1, 2009

Another update:

Installed OS X on an external drive (firewire, freshly formatted as a Mac bootable drive) with apparent success. Attempted to reboot from that drive. No dice. Similar symptoms as before: I get a flashing old OS-9 style question-mark folder (I actually did see this before). I can boot into open firmware. I can boot to the install DVD (after a long delay with the prohibition sign) and confirm that yes, the external drive is the boot drive. But I can't actually boot from it.
posted by adamrice at 3:21 PM on February 1, 2009

Boot in verbose mode and post the last few lines from the log please.
posted by rr at 6:51 PM on February 1, 2009

If you're having problems booting even from other sources like a FWHD, it's more evidence that it's the logic board that's failing...at least in this model. In a Mac mini, there isn't much more than a logic board for components inside, so LB swaps tend to be the only course of action for these models.

Another possibility, and it's a rare one, is that the HD is causing problems with your boot process. It's uncommon, but I've seen it just a few times where a failed/failing HD will cause the kind of behavior you're seeing...failure to boot, long boot times, difficulty selecting boot volume, etc. In each case, pulling the failing/failed HD and replacing it with a new one causes all the symptoms to disappear.

It's not overly difficult to replace a HD in a PPC Mac mini, but you should probably have some basic computer take-apart experience before doing so. There are take-apart guides and HD swap guides for this model at iFixit.com that you can follow if you don't have access to Apple's take-apart guides (Service Source via GSX for Apple Certified Techs).
posted by mrbarrett.com at 7:47 PM on February 1, 2009

Ultimately solved this problem by buying a new unibody Macbook.
posted by adamrice at 12:18 PM on March 4, 2009