2009 Mac Mini Constantly Hangs

[MacPoulet]

Hi all,

Been trying to troubleshoot my 2009 Mac Mini's issue. For the last few days, it's been constantly hanging to the point where I can't use it at all. I've been trying to figure out if it's a hardware issue or the OS is just borked. Here's what I've tried to do:

• Boot with all USB devices unplugged except keyboard and mouse (bluetooth has long since died as has the DVD-ROM): Still hangs and requires a hard reset.
• Boot into Safe Mode: No luck, it hangs there too requiring a hard reset.
• Reset PRAM and SMC: Some luck! I was able to open Disk Utility and scan my drive, no errors reported. After that, the computer hangs and I need to do a hard reboot.
• This morning I managed to get Activity Monitor open before it became unresponsive and "suggestd" seems to be hogging a lot of CPU cycles. The attached photo (with beach ball) was taken 30 minutes after I tried to kill the process. 90 minutes later, it's still like that.

I'm thinking my next step is to try and boot off a USB drive (I have a spare install of Mac OSX on my Mac Pro that I can toss into an external case). If it works, then I'm guessing it's an OS issue and I'll buy a new SSD (my Time Machine drive also died a little while ago and I haven't had a chance to get a replacement) to do a clean install while copying over my media files (the Mac Mini is only used as an iTunes server to stream video to our Apple TV).

Is there anything I can do to test if it's a hardware issue like bad ram?

Anything else I might be missing?

Thanks in advance!

 

[MacPoulet]

Just tried to do an Apple Hardware Test, but it doesn't work. It boots up normally and then hangs.