Software :: Mac Mini - Cannot Boot From Hard Drive
Jul 3, 2010
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.
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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.
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May 16, 2012
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?
Info:
Mac mini (Mid 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.4)
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Mar 5, 2012
Can I boot from a USB drive from a mac mini 2007 OSX 10.6 with a SATA drive? I want to install a Linux OS from a CD onto the USB then be able to select the bootable USB (linux) on startup. I understand that I can boot from the CD by holding down C when retarting the computer. I have also read I can use rEFIt as a boot loader to select whcih bootable drive I want at startup. Unfortuately, I have also read that there may be a problem actually booting from an external device in Mac. IS anyone actually booting form a USB on the mac mini?
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Jan 7, 2010
My friend gave me his old Apple cube G4 + 15" Cinema display in like 1000 pieces. Its completely teared apart. I tried a lot, but it doesn't work. The original IDE cable wasn't included, so I bought one for 2 cents. It should work or not? Maybe the powersupply. I'm not sure. I don't believe actually that the hardware itself, like the motherboard is broken. When everything is into place and I connect the cube to the powersupply it boots immediately. I don't have to do anything. Harddrive spins and the superdrive makes some noise as well. This repeats itself every 5 seconds. The screen is connected and gets power through DVI, but no display. Both the cube and display have touch enabled buttons to switch it on, but they do not respond (I guess).. Motherboard gives 2 light. DS1 is green, DS2 is red.
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Mar 8, 2012
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?
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Mar 6, 2009
Clearly there must be a way to do this, right? Can I install off an external hard drive? Off a USB drive? Share my macbook pro's DVD drive somehow? If the hard drive on the mac mini is completely reformatted and I plug it into the USB port on the external hard drive which I partition and install the Leopard DMG would it be able to boot off of it?
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Mar 22, 2012
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.
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Sep 29, 2010
Just got done loading 8gb of ram and my OCZ vertex 2 ssd 40gb. Load Time of apps is amazing. My one question is boot time went from 48 seconds to 33. Should I be getting better. I used carbon copy to clone drve and I'm only using 14 gb of the 40 that's there. I domhave to say these setup screams at certain jobs.
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Jun 20, 2012
I have a 2011 Mac mini with a 500gb hard drive. I want to upgrade it, have bought a Cruical M4 64GB SSD, WD Scorpio Black 750GB 7200 rpm drive and a second hard drive cable. I want to replace the 500gb drive with the 750gb drive and install the SSD. Then run the OS, PS and LR from the SSD. I want to clone my current drive to the new one but once I get both drives installed is there a way to remove the OS from the HDD? Can I do this or do I have to start from scratch and then reload everything? Really don't want to do that.
Info:Mac mini (Mid 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.3)
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Dec 26, 2010
i purchased a power mac G5 recently which broke after 2 days- it was bought from ebay. i sent it back to the seller who "repaired" it. It arrived today in the post and didnt work i oppend it up to see the hard drive had crack during transport, and the conector pins where bent and unconectable.
I made a clone copy of my macbook that should be bootable using something called carbon copy cloner, i now want to boot my power mac g5 from the external usb hard drive. This just apears on the screen with a folder and a question mark flashing. What can i do or is this possible.
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Mar 13, 2010
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.
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Jun 24, 2010
I recently tried to switch drives to run the Operating System 10.4.6 on my 1st gen G5 1.8ghz. The new drive(160GBs) is smaller than the old system drive(1TB) so I ran a 3rd party app to clone what I thought was the important stuff onto the new drive; but not everything because it wouldn't all fit. I moved everything that looked like it wasn't just a dumb folder with my media files on it. It seemed like I moved everything important on the new drive.
When I swapped out the drives in the top bay and booted the computer, the new drive didnt boot the OS, instead it opened up a black screen that looked like some sort of terminal. I did something wrong and I cant figure out what. Does anyone have better steps to take? Its not the end of the world to start over, but if anyone knows what I did wrong that would be super information!
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Jun 25, 2010
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?
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Jan 31, 2012
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I have made sure my Mac hard drive is the main one which it is, i formatted it and also repaired it and nothing is working.
I have an HP and a Seagate external hard drive hooked up to my mac also and the Verbatim is the one that gives me the issue so I dont know whats happening..
Info:
iMac 21.5" + Macbook White Unibody 13" + iPhone 4
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Dec 4, 2014
I got a Mac Pro (mid2010) with no HD installed. Do I need to do any switch settings on the drive before I put it in the machine?
Info:
Mac Pro, 2.8 QCX / 3X1G (MC560LL/A)
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Apr 13, 2012
Basically my hard drive randomly decided not to mount. It is a 60gb USB external hard drive. I have used a different mac, a PC and both didn't mount the hard drive. On windows it can not recognize the driver to mount but on mac nothing! I even tried external power, different USB leads and a new one. Still nothing. I think it may have become corrupt.
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Jun 1, 2012
Can you add more RAM and Hard Drive memory to a Mac Mini after you buy it? I'm pretty sure you can, but I am just making sure.
Info:iPhone 4, Windows7, iOS 4.3.5
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Jun 13, 2012
a couple of days before my wireless track pad and keyboard would have trouble connecting when computer is waken after sleep mode. Then one day my mac mini just suddenly stopped going in a physical sleep state. When I go to the apple sign and put the mac mini to sleep the screen turns black like usual but once its put to "sleep" the light indicator on the mac mini will not blink neither will I hear the hardrive slow down. whats going on. This is the standard $700 model mac mini mid 2011.
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Jul 5, 2012
My time maching back up is 60 GB less than my Hard Drive and I know that the back up is an accurate count of used GB's as I have been keeping an eye on this. I recently empltied my trash and found 15 GB's but I am still showing a 60 GB difference between what my MAC HD says vs. my Time Machine back up HD. How could this be? and where could I possibly missing 60GB. I would think if they were actually used somewhere that Time Machine would be backing them up as well.
Info:
Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.7.4)
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Jan 5, 2011
I am on a mac pro and I can navigate my OS drive fine in terminal but I have 3 other hard drives how to I go from my OS hard drive to one of my other hard drives?
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Jun 11, 2009
I have a unibody MacBook. Is it possible to install Mac OS X on a USB external hard drive and use that to boot?
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Jul 8, 2009
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.
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Mar 27, 2012
I wanted to get my MacBook Pro (OSX 10.6.8) to boot from a CD, which it did (turns out CD was faulty and didn't work). In order to do this I went to the System Options and selected boot from Disk option.
Only problem is now my Mac will only boot from a CD and not from the hard drive! How do I get it to boot from the hard drive again?
Info:
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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Apr 1, 2012
Gray screen and 'prohibited' logo appeared today without apparent reason.Forced a power down by holding power button. Restarted....eventually reached user login screen but froze again on login attempt after password entered.
Restrated again by forced power down but only got gray screen and spinning gear.
Have now spent many hours going through most conceivable options including...
following instructions on http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2570 re gray screen troubleshooting
have disconnected peripherals; reset smu, smc, and pram;
safe boot w shift key did nothing;
safe boot shift+v produced a screen of text that got as far as com.apple.launchd 1
but then several lines of text appeared repeating twice eaxctly same, each headed by disk0s2: I/O error. with [ErrNo 5], then
dyld: Library not loaded: and Reason: no suitable image found
final line ends with The System bootstrapper has crashed: Trace/BPT trap:5
I have tried installing from the original install disk several times but holding C key or Option/Alt key or D key gets no response and I cannot get the install disk to eject either holding down mouse button, eject button
I haven't done any recent upgrades or installed new software, no new peripherals attached.
Is this a dead hard drive or does someone have other suggestions that might work?
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
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May 2, 2012
just updated to 10.7.3, then cannot boot from hard drive. I boot from DVD and cannot find hard drive now
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
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Jul 2, 2010
My son is having a BIG problem with his Mac Mini. His Mini has a 1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, memory of 3GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM and runs Mac OS X Version 10.6.3. He has Time Machine and also a 1.5TB desktop hard drive. From time to time, he has been getting pop-up warnings that his internal hard drive was about to become full. He would then do some deleting and things would be fine until the next pop-up. Last week, after watching some videos on Utube, he tried to open iTunes and, instead of a pop-up, got an error message with some numbers (which he didn't write down). It began the usual routine, starting with a white screen with the apple logo in the center and the loading circle spinning right below it. After that, it normally goes to a light blue screen and then loads the desktop, but this time (and ever since) it stopped at the blue screen, empty except for the message "Hard Drive Full, Please Delete Data".
Apparently the screensaver still works, but not much else -- like the Finder. He said that he did get something to appear on the top bar by taking the batteries out of his Apple Bluetooth keyboard, bringing up the "Bluetooth Setup Assistant", but once a wired keyboard is plugged in, everything on the top bar disappears (since the Mac sees a keyboard). He was going to do a "restore" and, in preparation, thought he had done a successful back-up to his external hard drive using the Time Machine feature. However, when he checked the Time Machine under System Preferences it said that the external HD had nearly 1.5 TB unused (only a couple hundred pictures or so on it) and the Time Machine was supposed to put about 70GB on there. So now he is concerned that he didn't/can't do a back-up.
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Mar 13, 2008
My mother-in-laws Power PC Mac Mini stopped working the other day. After booting to disk utility and seeing that there wasn't a hard drive mounting I assumed the hard drive was dead. I ordered a replacement from OWC, opened the mini, and put in the new hard drive. Now I can't get the mini to boot from CD all I get is a blank gray screen and eventually the folder with a question mark icon. I was under the assumption I could boot to disc again, format and reinstall on the new hard drive. I also can't get the CD to eject but it is spinning up.
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Mar 13, 2009
Just received the latest Mac Mini with 320gb hard drive option. When I check "About this Mac", it shows a max capacity of 298.09gb. I feel ripped for 22gb. Anyone know what gives?
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Oct 6, 2009
thinking of relegating my mini to HTPC and buying a new base model 15" MacBook Pro. As both these systems have essentially the same hardware, including 9400M graphics, can I just swap the hard drives so my current 7200rpm mini drive goes into the new MacBook Pro, and the new, unused, 5400 rpm drive comes out of the Pro and into the mini?
Any reason this wouldn't work? I just think it would take a lot of time to back everything up to Time Capsule and then fresh install both hard drives.
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