2011 Mac Mini is Frozen

My 2011 Mac Mini upgraded to 8GB with Mountain Lion has just frozen.

This happend whilst streaming video online. I got the beachball so i had to switch the mac off and on.

Now, everytime i switch it on, it takes ages getting to the grey screen with the spinning wheel. When it eventually gets to the login screen i get the beachball again when i've put in my password. It takes about 30mins just to get to the desktop screen.

The mouse cursor seems move around as it should but just get beachball when on desktop.

I put my old ram back in the mac and its still doing that. Not sure if this is hardware or software issue.

Is there are way to boot up in safe mode or to do checks. Ive noticed the hard drive isnt making much noise so not sure if thats related.

Luap said:

Repair permissions and run some diagnostics on the HD.

Click to expand...

How to i get to repair permissions to run the diagnostics ?

Am new to macs, coming from pc's.

I also dont have any os/repair cds.

lunaoso said:

For repairing disk permissions, hold the option key at boot up and use the arrow keys to go to the osx repair partition and click enter. Then open up disk utility. Click on your Macintosh HD in the sidebar and click repair disk permissions. Or you can just open disk utility on your normal boot up. It does the same thing but using the recovery partition will hopefully get around the sluggishness.

Click to expand...

Tried that and still not made any difference. Done a hardware test and it came with an error of

Alert! Apple Hardware Test has detected an error: 4HDD/11/40000000: SATA(0,0)


which relates to faulty hard drive. I think ive still got a few weeks warranty left on the Mini so if its the fault with HDD then i can claim it on warranty.

I also did a reinstall of OS but still the same.

Just cant be bothered to box it all up so i'd be hoping that i can just send the HDD back.

How do I wipe the hdd ? I don't want my personal files to be accessible to anyone.