Help Needed - Possible firmware issue

[Inutopia]

Hi all,

I've got a problem with my old Mini. It's a 1.66 Core Duo model.

I actually sold the machine to a friend a couple of years ago and now it's developed a strange fault. Basically it was giving the question mark in a folder when he brought it to me, so given the age of the machine I assumed the HD was on the way out and installed another from an old laptop that was lying about.

Now the old laptop had an install of XP on it but I just figured Id wipe it when I went to install 10.6

Strangely the machine still gives the "?" at boot but then goes ahead and boots the laptop's XP install. Pressing alt, c, d, resetting pram/nvram all produce no result. Neither does holding T to try to boot to firewire target disk mode.

So I'm stuck, because I can't install OS X to the drive or even boot the installer to repartition.

Does anyone know whats up here? Usually the question mark at boot means it can't find a boot volume I thought?

Thanks for any help you can provide!

Chris

 

[FrankHahn]

Wipe the HDD on a Windows machine.

I had such an experience when I got an SSD for my mini. To test the SSD, I installed Linux on it. When I put the SSD into my mini, the mini booted in Linux. I had to take the SSD out, put the original HDD in, and restored Lion onto the SSD which was attached to the mini through USB in an enclosure.