Mac mini seriously ill

[Auntie Helen]

Our Mac Mini is feeling very unwell. It crashed this morning and since then it takes forever to boot up to the login screen page and then hangs. We've tried various things on it but fear the hard disk is seriously unwell.

Our data is stored on a separate disk drive but there's an awful lot of stuff I don't want to lose that's on the main Mac Mini. At the moment we're thinking we may have to buy another one. Anyone got any ideas?

 

[andrew-the-tortoise]

Not had this problem with mine [yet??] - but could try this.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1417


If there is an Apple Store nearby it would be worth dropping it in, they sorted my mac-mini out in 5 minutes when a CD got jammed.

 

[tosbert]

If it were me, I would first create a disk image of the mac mini asap (Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility) to an external HDD (- this will save the exact settings etc of the mac mini, which you can either restore to a new HDD or mount in OSX and grab what you need from it).
Then once you have all of your data backed up, boot off the installation CD that came with the mac (hold down C key until the Apple sign appears). Once this has booted, at the top of the screen click on Installer -> Disk Utility, then select First Aid. Select your HDD from the list and click Repair. This should then check and repair anything suspect on the HDD. Worth a try maybe?

 

[Auntie Helen]

We've been trying to boot from the installation disk and it refuses, oddly (it's the correct disk for the computer).

My husband is working hard at looking at it. He's wondering if there's some corruption on the HDD as he's able to see some stuff, so is working his way through some disk utilities. He's doing the First Aid as we speak.

It's a bit of a mare, though, as our Adobe CS2 disks are no longer available to us... so if we have to buy a new Mac we will have to buy CS2 again...

 

[tosbert]

I wouldn't have thought a new Mac was in order, but if it is....

You might be able to just drag the application from the application folder to an external disk off your existing mac - I believe that most apps are salvageable that way. Then if you get a new mac, just copy it to the new machine... sorted!

If you find it is the HDD that's faulty, why not just buy a new disk and change it - cheaper than a new Mac?
http://soledadpenades.com/2007/11/01/diy-replace-your-intel-mac-minis-hard-disk-drive/

 

[colinr]

Do you have access to another Mac? If so you could try booting up with Target Disk mode (makes the other Mac treat yours like an external HD). You could then copy files off and run disk and permission repairs to see if that helped.

Target disk mode: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661

 

[gaz]

It's best not to do any more with it, and contact either Apple or an Apple repair shop to fix it. It will be cheaper than buying a new mac and they can often recover your data and fix the issue you have.

 

[Auntie Helen]

We have another Mac and tried the Target Mode with no joy - the HDD is clearly under the weather.

New Mac is ordered and now won't arrive until Wednesday, annoyingly But as I use it for 10 hours at least per day, and all my freelance work is on it, we decided we needed to get a new one ASAP. We may try to fix the old one so that we have another backup. At least I found my CS2 disks!

 

[Black Sheep]

We've been trying to boot from the installation disk and it refuses, oddly (it's the correct disk for the computer).

My husband is working hard at looking at it. He's wondering if there's some corruption on the HDD as he's able to see some stuff, so is working his way through some disk utilities. He's doing the First Aid as we speak.

It's a bit of a mare, though, as our Adobe CS2 disks are no longer available to us... so if we have to buy a new Mac we will have to buy CS2 again...

i know its a pain but CS2 should be very easy to get hold of cheap, they've brought out CS4 a few months ago.

it sounds like a similar problem to the one i had with my G4 a while back - i ended up doing an archive and instal to sort it.

has the OS ever been upgraded to a newer one?

 

[Auntie Helen]

OS was as original and hadn't given us a blip of trouble in 3.5 years.

Have relocated our CS2 disks, phew!

New Mini arrives tomorrow

Old Mini will then be fixed and used as backup.

 

[Melvil]

We just have had about 3 weeks of the mac being very very slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow, taking forever to boot and crashing when even a web browser is loaded.

A wipe and fresh install of leopard sorted things right out.

Now, it might be a coincidence and I certainly don't want to go jumping to any conclusions but thinking back the problems started around the time we installed the desktop client of BBC iplayer. I can't think of any other mod that might have caused what happened.