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blizzard · Nov 17, 2009, 02:12 AM

This one's got me beat. My Mac mini 1.83 crashed earlier today, and while it will turn on, it promptly turns itself off again while still at the grey Apple logo. Normally I'd boot from the DVD to reinstall...but the only keyboard command that works on boot now appears to be cmd-optn-p-r...which had no effect on the problem. Option won't bring up the boot screen, c won't boot from a CD, command c does nothing, s won't boot single user...I can't think of what happened, what the problem might be, or how I'll fix it without these up my sleeve. The only inkling I had that something was awry was an error in Transmission before the computer froze...something about file I/O, which led me to suspect the hard drive, but I don't know why a failed HD would prevent me from booting from a CD. Has anyone seen anything remotely like this before?

One more thing...double click on the mouse to eject a CD on start DOES work. Not sure what that could mean though.

Thanks in advance.

reader50 · Nov 17, 2009, 03:25 AM

I'd expect a hardware fault to disable all those things. Does this Mini use a PATA bus for the HD + Optical? If so, a bad component can make the bus unusable. Disconnect the internal HD and see if it will boot from optical afterwards.

Of the commands you describe, all require stuff to load from the disk bus ... except cmd-opt-p-r.

blizzard · Nov 17, 2009, 03:58 AM

Originally Posted by reader50

Does this Mini use a PATA bus for the HD + Optical?

It's a SATA HD and a PATA Superdrive. I ordered a new HD for my laptop a week ago, so thankfully I'll have the parts to try a swap. Thanks for the help...I'll let you know how it goes. Be nice if all that was zonked was the HD.

blizzard · Nov 17, 2009, 08:42 PM

I was able to pull out both the hard drive and the third party RAM I was using, but there's no change. The computer now flashes the question mark folder, but it can't be convinced to boot off the DVD drive by either the C key or the Option key. Ideas? The new hard drive still hasn't arrived so I'm unable to try it yet, but if I still can't boot from the OS X Install CD I'm not feeling this is a hopeful pursuit.

reader50 · Nov 17, 2009, 09:09 PM

Do you have an external FW or USB drive for testing with? Another Mac will do, booted in FW target disk mode. Disconnect both internal drives before doing the test, in case either / both are the problem.

If it can't boot from any external device, then I'd be thinking of the power supply or motherboard next. And asking if you have AppleCare.

blizzard · Nov 18, 2009, 01:09 AM

Well, the good news is, target disk mode worked once I tracked down a Firewire cable. The install DVD seemed to work just fine, and even the hard drive mounted. Tried to copy some files, the transfer froze. Tried to repair, it failed. Tried to format, got the following:

Disk Erase failed with the error:

POSIX reports: The operation couldn’t be completed. Cannot allocate memory.

Not sure what it means but as soon as the new HD arrives I'll toss it in and try it out. Hopefully it's just a bad HD after all. Can a failed HD actually prevent the computer from booting in the manner it so far has?? I would've thought that it just would've dropped off the list of available drives and caused a question mark folder on start.

reader50 · Nov 18, 2009, 01:48 AM

Most of the clues still point to the drives. But that one error suggests RAM. Have you tried pulling the Apple RAM while putting the 3rd party RAM back in? Don't assume the Apple-supplied RAM stick will always be the good one.

Suggestion: put your Install DVD into the other Mac's optical drive. Option-boot, select the Apple Hardware Test partition. Run all tests, see if anything glitches.

To test your RAM if you don't have AHT available, you could load Rember onto the other Mac's drive. This will only test unused RAM unfortunately. Ideally, you should boot in single-user mode and run the command-line version of memtest (included inside the Rember app bundle).

blizzard · Nov 18, 2009, 03:16 AM

Out of curiosity, would that error indicate a problem with the RAM in the mini? Disk Utility was being run on the MBP that the mini was plugged into, and I've had zero problems with the memory in the laptop.

What I did was pulled out both sticks of aftermarket RAM in the mini and re-installed the 512 meg stick that came OEM, with no improvement. It's still in there, and the problems still exist.

I'll try the option-boot tomorrow. I'm not in possession of the original Mac mini installation discs though...the DVD I've been using was the 10.4 drop-in that was thrown into the refurb box two and a half years ago when the computer shipped. Will the Macbook's AHT run on the mini's HD in target mode?

Thanks again, I'm learning a lot about troubleshooting here.

blizzard · Nov 19, 2009, 03:17 AM

Well, figured out the problem was the hard drive, and the hard drive only. The drive I ordered a few weeks ago for my laptop finally arrived, so I tossed it in the mini to see what effect it would have. Voilà—everything worked again, RAM and all. Guess the ol' girl's gonna be kicking around for a while yet!