2011 Mini HD Dead or Something Else?

[onlycopunk]

So just recently my mac mini has acted up.

I restarted it one day and it to aaaaaaaggggeeees to boot up. And I mean ages. After it booted I couldn't start any programs and was basically getting the spinning wheel.

After this I restarted and am now stuck on the grey screen. I've tried everything, read everything, basically researched the Sh@t out of this.

Another problem I have is the hotkey shortcuts on start up are not working. The only think I can do is press menu on an apple remote to get to the recovery disk.

20 minutes later it boots into recovery, ran verify disk, all good, ran repair disk, crashed.

Rebooted again into recovery mode and chose to reinstall Mavericks. Downloaded and now hanging on 0 Seconds to Finish for the past hour.


In my past experiences, I would imagine this is the HD almost dead. I've made an apointment with the genius bar for Monday as it's earliest I can get in. But I don't want to get there and have them flick a switch, fix my machine and charge me $150 as it's out of warranty.

I should note that I have not done anything different. Nothing new plugged in, no changes in hardware. Just one day decided to crap itself.

Any insights? I'm happy to buy a new HD and put it in myself, but just want to make sure that's the actual problem and it's not something more.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

You can try erase & install. If the hardware is OK, this will get you back to a fresh install that you can restore to. If the hardware is bad, this will also fail & you can keep your Genius Bar appt.

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH14243

 

[onlycopunk]

Done the drastic and erased and attempted to reinstall OS X. 5 hours laters and it's crawling to even do the initial setup. So yeah I think somethings really buggered unfortunately. Hopefully nothing too big.

 

[blanka]

Just pick this unfortunate event as a reason to do a good upgrade. Open the machine, trash the HD and slip in for example a Samsung 840pro 256 with a WD Scorpio black or so. IF the stock HD has been one quite some hours since 2011, it might walk on its last leg.

Just to make sure it is the HD, try to boot it from an external drive first.

 

[Fishrrman]

[[ Just to make sure it is the HD, try to boot it from an external drive first. ]]

Blanka is right.

One should always, always, ALWAYS have a "second bootable drive" nearby, for times like this.

This is why a "cloned backup" (made with CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper) is SUPERIOR to a Time Machine backup.

Not only will it get you booted if there's a problem with the internal hard drive, all "your stuff" will be RIGHT THERE in front of you, as ready to use as if you had booted from the internal drive. No "restoration" (from the TM backup) needed. Just connect the backup, boot, and go.