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dictoresno

macrumors 601
Original poster
Apr 30, 2012
4,532
665
NJ
I'm running a late 2014 Mac mini 3.0GHz, i7 16GB RAM with a WD Black PCIe boot drive and an internal WD Blue 2.5 inch SSD also with Ventura 13.2.1 installed on both with an HP27FW monitor. I currently have the WD Black PCIe as the default boot drive, however OCLP's boot picker shows at startup.

earlier tonight I did a reboot for the first time in a few days and the computer chimed when booting up but I was just getting a black screen, which eventually turned into the apple logo, then a progress bar appeared and eventually booted into the OS just fine. wanting to see what was wrong, thinking it was a one off thing, I rebooted a few more times. same thing happens every time now.

no boot chime, screen turns on to black screen. and stays blank for about a minute. eventually a VERY dim,laggy boot picker slowly appears but then disappears (so dim that I probably wouldn't have seen it if I was in a bright room) and I'm unable to make a selection. the screen then shows the apple logo by itself for about 30 seconds, then the progress bar appears and 15 seconds later, I'm in Ventura.

anyone know why this is happening? should I rebuild OCLP and reinstall on both drives EFI? I thought maybe it was the monitor, so I turned the auto-detecting source for the monitor off and have it only set to read the one HDMI port. when I had the old spinning hard drive installed before I swapped, it was running Monterey and booted just fine with the chime every time normally so I assume this has to do with OCLP and some EFI modification.

***let it be known these drives were installed in my 2015 iMac before (when OCLP was built and installed) then took them out and plugged them into the Mac mini. OCLP alerted me that the installed disks were built in a different Mac model and OCLP is tailored to that specific one, and I would need to rebuild and reinstall the patcher.....which I did to both drives. both drives booted fine before rebuilding and re-patching (other than graphic issues).
 
ok so I was able to resolve the issue. figuring there was some kind of issue with the EFI on either drive, I decided to do the following.

Before wiping my primary Ventura drive, I wiped the internal 1TB WD Blue drive running the Ventura I wasn't using from within Ventura on the PCIe drive (my primary). I then inserted a Monterey install USB and rebooted. once the black screen changed to the apple logo, I was able to get into recovery. I installed Monterey to the 1TB drive and was able to boot into it successfully. The boot option menu that OCLP enabled appears correctly soon after a working boot chime. all appears well now. I guess there was some kind of EFI issue with the 1TB drive or the computer didn't like managing two instances of Ventura on it. either way, the issue is resolved without the need to wipe my primary drive.
 
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