Mac Mini :: Will Not Boot From CD Or Hard Drive, Internal Or External
Jan 23, 2009
I have owned a Mac Mini for three years now (my friends convinced me to try the Apple way and this is my first Mac). The CD/DVD died just three weeks after warranty expired and Apple said (in essence) 'tough crap...you didn't buy AppleCare'.I have functioned without a CD/DVD drive since then, and everything was fine... until a week or two ago. We installed an update in iTunes, and everything started running S...L...O...W... So, we rebooted the computer! Instead of rebooting, it made the "bong!" sound and then a screen with an apple and a spinning wheel runs indefinitely. We let it run all night the first time and it stays on that screen for as long as you let it.
I just picked up a Mac Mini today, after I lost all patience with my circa 2007 MacBook Pro when it stopped booting up this morning. I ordered more RAM and am planning to install the recently replaced hard drive from my MBP into my Mac Mini. I'm just wondering, will that drive just show up as another hard drive, similar to the way that external hard drives appear? And more importantly, the old hard drive has an older version of Snow Leopard installed, as well as a bunch of software, including my Adobe CS software. I've already jumped through hoops with Adobe to get my software reinstalled on my MBP a few months ago, and I don't feel like dealing with that again. So if the drive does show up as a separate device, can I just run my Adobe software from that drive? Or do I have to reboot but select that old hard drive at startup (if that's even an option) to run all software on it?
This is in regards to the 2010 mini. I have been reading up on SSD, Hybrids and FW800 with a 7200. What is the easiest AND most effective/cost effective solution? If I went he FW800 route, can I use the same drive as my data storage drive? Will there be enough headroom to run the OS over FW and use the drive to stream movies playing in another room on Apple TV2 simultaneously? Will this give me a performance increase over the internal 5400 if I use the external 7200 for everything over FW800?
That is where my thoughts about the hybrid come into play. I know I can stream the iTunes content over USB2, which I have at the moment for the big drive. I would need to go buy an enclosure with FW800 to run it as a boot drive. I could use that same money and go get a 500GB Hybrid drive and install myself and leave the USB2 as data only. If the install is painless but tedious, I might just do that. If the FW800 route would be robust enough to run the OS and stream data to other devices simultaneously (ie use it as I would the regular internal drive), I might just do that and wait for SSD prices to come tumbling down and do a bigger internal SSD in the future.
I started this situation with a bootable hard drive that I removed from a 4,1 (mid 2008) and a brand new unibody MacBook Pro. What I wanted to do was use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the old drive to the new MBP. I used CCC to clone the drive to the new one and repaired permissions on the internal drive and tried booting from it. No Luck. I figured this was stupid to do and I could just use migration assistant so I decided to reinstall Leopard on the unibody. Unfortunately when I attempt to boot from the DVD it doesn't go past a blank grey screen. I also tried holding down option to open the boot manager and select the DVD, when hit enter over the DVD it freezes. The interesting thing is that when I connect the old drive to the unibody using an enclosure I can boot from the external drive no problem. I tried using another computer to install leopard on the unibody over firewire and the installation went fine but when I start the unibody it doesn't go past a blank grey screen. I am also positive the hard drive isn't damaged or anything because when I go to the boot manager after leopard is installed the internal drive shows up but when I select it, it freezes. I have tried resetting the PRAM, NVRAM, repairing the disk (which is successful). When I try to boot into single user mode the computer freezes when loading the text. Another interesting thing is that when do boot from the external drive it goes through verbose mode every time and I never choose to do that. Right now I am attempting to clone drive using Super Duper to new drive and see what happens.
This is what im trying to do. I have a macbook with 120gb hard drive. thats not enough space from my music collection. So i was wondering how to make itunes run off a external hard drive. I looked around and found was for a PC.
I just got a used mac pro quad. I plan to use it for video production- final cut pro, pics - aperture, and music production- protools. THe computer came with 3 - 10k rpm 160g hd's. Two of them are set up as a raid 0. I like the idea of having a faster drive as a boot drive, but 160 seems kind of small to me as the drive to run memory hungry apps and the operating system. Am I right? I could go to a 300g 10k rpm drive. I am also thinking about getting a bigger drive, say a 750g or 1 tb 7200 rpm. Should I use this as the boot drive or as a secondary storage drive?. If it's the boot drive should I add the other 160g 10k drive to the raid or keep it separate? I assume that neither way would be wrong, nor create a problem, but since I haven't put anything on it yet, I'm wondering what would be the most efficient way to manage my files and get the most out of my computer.
Alright I have a current rev Mini 1.83ghz, and want to upgrade the stock 80gb HD, wondering if this drive will work. [URL]. I want the 7200RPM, but wasn't sure 3.0GB would work on the intel controller, thinking it may only support 1.5GB. Also, when I reinstall leopard, does it allow me to format the drive to HFS+ or how would I do this?
Looking for opinions or comparisons on performance between an internal mac hard drive vs an external firewire 800 hard drive or better. Is the performance on an internal MP drive or iMac internal drive much faster than connecting to a firewire 800 drive? I'm sure it depends on the drive, I'm wondering about apple factory installed internal drive vs say a WD external firewire 800
I've got my iTunes Library on an external drive, but for some reason all of my Apps download onto my internal hard-drive, and if I move them onto the external drive they all corrupt.Any suggestions? The music/videos work perfectly.
How do I transfer all data from my old internal hard drive to a new internal hard drive? I have an iMac with a 320gb internal HD that is full and I am replacing it with a 2tb internal drive. I have several external drives; 1 tb, 2tb and 3 tb. The 2 tb is being used for Time Machine. Do I have to buy an enclosure? If so, where would I get an inexpensive one? I also want to partition the new internal drive for Windows, and I'm not sure how much space to use for that. I plan to use Windows to check my work in PowerPoint created on my Mac for clients on PCs.
I have a mac mini G4, 1.25 ghz, 512 MB running OS 10.4. To override a firmware password, I installed a 1 GB ram, restarted while zapping the PRAM but it started up with a flashing file and question mark. I switched back the 512 MB ram, but it's doing the same thing. (I successfully wiped out the firmware password)
I have tried the following:
1. Starting while holding the option key, but it does not give me a list of mounted drives to choose from (there's only an arrow key and a circular arrow key on the screen - both do nothing when pressed)
2. The same thing as above happens when I try to start in single user mode.
3. I started from the OS 10.4 disk and was able to choose the option to repair the hard disk in the disk utility - which came back clean, no repairs needed. I also verified and repaired disk permissions.
4. From the install disk, the only options to choose for a start up disk is the network or the DVD, the mac mini hard drive is not an option.
5. I was able to start in target mode and via firewire, see the mounted mac mini hard drive on a second mac. I had full access to all the files, everything seemed in order.
I am stumped. I can choose the hard drive to repair it, I can see it mounted on a second computer, but I cannot see it to choose it as my start up disk.
My internal 1TB hard drive on my iMac is dead and I don't have the money to replace it at the moment. I have everything backed up on an external 1TB drive using Time Machine. As a workaround for the time being,Is there any way I can install the system on the external drive and use that as the boot drive without erasing the Time Machine Backups? It seems to me I would have to have two partitions for the external drive, one for the system, and one for Time Machine. But is there any way to add a partition without erasing the existing one with Time Machine only on it?
My G5 2.5 has sprung a leak and is now kaput (no parts, no one can service). What I's like to do is pull the drive with some legacy stuff I need (Quickbooks and years of business stuff) and boot a new mac mini or imac from this drive. I've given up waiting for a new desktop and they are priced out of this word.
Sorry if I am in the wrong forum, as you can guess im a newbie at the forum - not at computers though (6 years experience.. )
So I have a 1TB WD Hard drive USB and I copied the Leopard Disk image and restored it onto it in a 500GB partition.
I have tried to boot it up normally by holding down Alt on start up but the drive doesn't come up. Ok.
I have tried going into the Start up Disk, it comes up and when I click on it and click restart it doesn't restart, it just does that Mac Beep thing.
I have recently just tried to boot it up manually using the Open Firmware technique. It doesn't work.
I have a PPC Mac and I know that they can't normally boot up USB Drives but the other users which I read on the thread how to boot up by the Firmware technique said they're PPC and it worked.
I just wanted to format my computer, My leopard disk is gone now but I got it copied JUST IN TIME to my Hard drive.
I formatted my computer and now i'm stuck on Tiger.
I want to make a bootable clone of my iMac (PowerPC G5 running OS 10.5.8) and also backup my MacBook Pro onto an external USB hard drive so that I can restore from the external hard drive if my iMac dies (which is beginning to have startup problems).
I was planning to create 3 partitions - one for iMac's data which I'll continue to backup using TimeMachine, one for my MacBook Pro's data and one partition as a bootable clone of my iMac.
My question is.... if my iMac dies, how do I use the external hard drive to boot up from? Do I need Carbon Copy Cloner or will I be able to boot up from the external hard drive and access Apple's Disk Utility?
I am considering purchasing diskwarrior but want to make sure it can help my situation before I purchase it. My imac will not boot from the internal hard drive (Intel processor) When I use disk utility to try and repair the disk, I get error messages and it won't repair. I can see the HD but cannot repair it. When I connect using target mode with my mac book pro, the hard drive does not appear on my host (macbook pro) computer. I have reloaded OS X (Leopard) onto a firewire external drive and can boot my imac that way but I can not find my original internal Macintosh HD. Will disk warrior be able to help with this scenario. I would really like to access that internal Macintosh HD and retrieve my files.
My imac G5 isight's hard drive is dead. I would like to install OS X on an external hard drive and just use that as the hard drive for this machine. My questions are:
Can I boot from an external hard drive via USB and just run everything off the external hard drive? If so, how should I format the external hard drive so that it can be selected and written to when I boot from the install cd? The external hard drive I would like to use is a 75 gig Acom. I've tried booting from the install cd, and it either won't even find the external hard drive, or, when it does, it says it can't write to that external hard drive.
I have an Intel iMac with with Snow Leopard and Windows 7 on separate partitions. Recently I have acquired an external USB hard drive. I formatted it with Ext4, and installed Linux Mint to it.
The installation went smoothly, but I can't seem to boot from the USB drive anymore. Holding down Option on start-up only gives me two choices: Mac OS X and Windows. The drive isn't recognized in either operating systems anymore: on Snow Leopard I get "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" and on Windows, it doesn't even show up in My Computer.
Is there any way I could install Windows 7/Vista/XP on my MacBook using Bootcamp, but install the Windows OS on an external hard drive instead of my internal drive? I hope this is making sense.
I want to know, is there any specific way possible I can set up my external hard drive so that when I plug it in, it mounts as an image file? So say I have a file "Image.DMG" on my desktop, I want to make it so that my external hard drive "becomes" Image.DMG, so when I plug it in, that's what it mounts as. I would like to do this because I want to make a boot image using my external hard drive.
im in the market for a macbook and when i get iot i want to put windows on an external hard drive and use that to dual boot. is this possible? i am new to macs so i know nothing about it.
to run ppc g4 powerbook from external hard drive with apps from external hd drive intel imac g5? I have a firewire hd but it is not being recognized by the ppc.
Two years ago I installed Leopard on a pair of striped Fantom Hard Drives (3TBs) via Firewire 800, and have been running my 2007 Macbook Pro off it ever since. When Snow Leopard came out, I updated it with no problems. When Lion came out, again no problems. Last month I bought a CalDigit VR2 with dual hard drives (4TBs) specifically built for running OS externally. But no matter how I configure, install, or connect... it will not boot up my Macbook Pro, or my Macbook Air.
Last week I bought a new Fantom external hard drive (1.5TBs) and discovered the same exact issue, with one exception... the Fantom will boot the Macbook Pro via USB 2.0, but only when plugged into the left side port.
Has anyone else noticed this change?
P.S. I've talked to the people at CalDigit, Fantom, and Apple, and no one seems to have an answer.
Lacie and a few other brands used to make external additional hard drives for the old mac mini which were boxed in similar shapes to the mini and allowed them to be stacked. Any idea if any company is doing anything similar now the shape has changed?
It's with sadness and deep regret that I must put my 9 year old Dual G4 out to pasture.
I picked up a mac mac mini and it will be performing nearly all the same functions as the G4, including file serving and being the Time Machine source.
Question. Today, I have my iTunes and iPhoto libraries on a FW400 WD hard drive. Time Machine backs up that data to another WD FW 400 hard drive.
Moving to the mini, I'll have to make the external drives USB2. No big deal.
But purely from a set up perspective... Am I better off keeping things as is, keeping the files on an external drive and backup up to an external drive? Or should I put my iTunes and iPhoto libraries on the mini hard drive? Just looking for perhaps the best setup, etc.
I recently bought a new Mac mini and Seagate goflex 3TB external hard drive. The computer is awesome but if I have the external hard drive plugged in, it messes with the restart/shutdown. The mac will act like it's powering down and go to the blank white screen but will never turn off and shows the little gray lines that go in that circular motion at the bottom of the screen. If I disconnect the USB from the Mac then it completes its power down. I've tried the suggestions of repairing disks or disk permissions, as well as resetting the PRAM, which have worked sometimes but the the problem reoccurs. I've also tried ejecting the external hard drive before shutting down on the Mac but I'll either get an error message or nothing happens and then the above shutdown issue occurs.
Why does this happen and what can I do so that I can always have the external plugged in and not have to manually unplug it so the Mac can shutdown?
