Fair warning, I'm probably gonna ramble a bit...
The other day, I was gifted a mid-2010 Mac Mini from a friend. Seems stock (2.4 Duo, 2GB RAM, 320GB). The system had originally been in use as a touch screen kiosk in a mall or something, primarily running Win7 via BootCamp. Being PC users at heart, my friend started by wiping all the drive partitions, and...found himself stuck. Not sure what else he tried before giving it to me, but he was unable to get any OS loaded back onto it himself.
So I start fiddling with it.
Booted a High Sierra Install USB (all my install USBs during this process are made wia TransMac on Win10, for now) relatively quickly, seemed to complete the initial stage of the install fine (apart from the date changing nonsense), and rebooted. During that first reboot, install progress appeared to stall almost immediately....let it sit for a couple hours with no obvious progress, so rebooted and started over...
The first thing noticed is, from here on out, boot from USB takes FOREVER. ~10+ minutes from power to install menu. I erase/re-partition the drive again and start the install over. The next umpteen install attempts with High Sierra and/or Lion all fail/error out at the 2-3 minutes remaining mark, with the hard drive still left in an unbootable state (i.e. not showing up on my boot menu). High Sierra would perform it's install process quickly, Lion would stall at several points, taking a good 15-20min longer than High Sierra to fail.
Additionally, while the Lion USB seemed to boot a little faster than High Sierra, it would hang at the Language Select menu for a good 10+ minutes, unresponsive. Mouse would move, but not respond to clicks. Display would auto-sleep and was able to return. But otherwise just unresponsive.
At this stage, I broke down and pulled the hard drive, tossed it in my dock for testing.
The original drive produced a couple weird results. Namely, what should have been an 8192KB cache only reported as ~7202KB, and the drive would only report as Sata 1.5 instead of 3, with speeds that seemed to match. SMART data otherwise reported normal.
So, I swapped the drive with a newer Hitachi 320GB I had that tested much better.
This did not change the Mini's behavior at all.
But at least I knew I could trust the drive now.
After a few more (unchanged) attempts at High Sierra and Lion, and fell back to Snow Leopard and gave it a shot. Initially, it went the same...slow to boot from USB, hung for a while at Language, install seemed to stall at places but seemed to complete after roughly 30-45 minutes. Like the others, this one errors at the end of install, but this time it was a "couldn't boot from target drive" error or some such and directed me to the Startup Drive utility. Startup Drive utility gave a bless error -- drive couldn't be unmounted, I determined. A simple reboot and we were on our way....
Snow Leopard booted into intial setup. Like the install, it hung for quite a while at Language. But once things reached desktop, it seemed smooth-ish. Likewise, on reboot, the desktop remains unresponsive for several minutes. And, while in use, there are frequent freezes (still with mouse movement) that can last 1-5 minutes.
While installing system updates for Snow Leopard, the system reboots fairly quickly, but hangs on the update screen for a while. A hazy, purple screen overlay...like the screen hasn't fully faded in yet...you can still faintly see the Software Update window behind it, and you can see the progress bar moving, but the mouse cursor is also locked. As updates reach around the 75% mark, the screen will come fully into focus and mouse movement is restored.
While the system *seems* to be operating within acceptable temps, I can't help but wonder if this is all some sort of thermal issue. (MFC reports the CPU die temps as 50's on average, and haven't seen it about 66 yet -- interestingly, when things are "frozen", I can still watch things like MFC updating every couple seconds -- but MFC also doesn't appear to be showing the GPU temp.) I'm debating pulling the board and refreshing the heatsinks to see if that helps any.
I've not yet been able to run ASD on the system yet. I'm still working on getting ASD 3S139. (That should have been my first step, but I apparently lost my old archive torrent which had individual files, and am waiting on a full 50+GB archive to download. Perhaps tomorrow.)
As old as this thing is, it doesn't hardly seem worth the trouble, but I'm very very stubborn, and I'd really like to reach a point where I can get this thing stable, add some ram to it, maybe an SSD, and have a nice little productivity box running High Sierra tucked discreetly away on my desk.
The other day, I was gifted a mid-2010 Mac Mini from a friend. Seems stock (2.4 Duo, 2GB RAM, 320GB). The system had originally been in use as a touch screen kiosk in a mall or something, primarily running Win7 via BootCamp. Being PC users at heart, my friend started by wiping all the drive partitions, and...found himself stuck. Not sure what else he tried before giving it to me, but he was unable to get any OS loaded back onto it himself.
So I start fiddling with it.
Booted a High Sierra Install USB (all my install USBs during this process are made wia TransMac on Win10, for now) relatively quickly, seemed to complete the initial stage of the install fine (apart from the date changing nonsense), and rebooted. During that first reboot, install progress appeared to stall almost immediately....let it sit for a couple hours with no obvious progress, so rebooted and started over...
The first thing noticed is, from here on out, boot from USB takes FOREVER. ~10+ minutes from power to install menu. I erase/re-partition the drive again and start the install over. The next umpteen install attempts with High Sierra and/or Lion all fail/error out at the 2-3 minutes remaining mark, with the hard drive still left in an unbootable state (i.e. not showing up on my boot menu). High Sierra would perform it's install process quickly, Lion would stall at several points, taking a good 15-20min longer than High Sierra to fail.
Additionally, while the Lion USB seemed to boot a little faster than High Sierra, it would hang at the Language Select menu for a good 10+ minutes, unresponsive. Mouse would move, but not respond to clicks. Display would auto-sleep and was able to return. But otherwise just unresponsive.
At this stage, I broke down and pulled the hard drive, tossed it in my dock for testing.
The original drive produced a couple weird results. Namely, what should have been an 8192KB cache only reported as ~7202KB, and the drive would only report as Sata 1.5 instead of 3, with speeds that seemed to match. SMART data otherwise reported normal.
So, I swapped the drive with a newer Hitachi 320GB I had that tested much better.
This did not change the Mini's behavior at all.
But at least I knew I could trust the drive now.
After a few more (unchanged) attempts at High Sierra and Lion, and fell back to Snow Leopard and gave it a shot. Initially, it went the same...slow to boot from USB, hung for a while at Language, install seemed to stall at places but seemed to complete after roughly 30-45 minutes. Like the others, this one errors at the end of install, but this time it was a "couldn't boot from target drive" error or some such and directed me to the Startup Drive utility. Startup Drive utility gave a bless error -- drive couldn't be unmounted, I determined. A simple reboot and we were on our way....
Snow Leopard booted into intial setup. Like the install, it hung for quite a while at Language. But once things reached desktop, it seemed smooth-ish. Likewise, on reboot, the desktop remains unresponsive for several minutes. And, while in use, there are frequent freezes (still with mouse movement) that can last 1-5 minutes.
While installing system updates for Snow Leopard, the system reboots fairly quickly, but hangs on the update screen for a while. A hazy, purple screen overlay...like the screen hasn't fully faded in yet...you can still faintly see the Software Update window behind it, and you can see the progress bar moving, but the mouse cursor is also locked. As updates reach around the 75% mark, the screen will come fully into focus and mouse movement is restored.
While the system *seems* to be operating within acceptable temps, I can't help but wonder if this is all some sort of thermal issue. (MFC reports the CPU die temps as 50's on average, and haven't seen it about 66 yet -- interestingly, when things are "frozen", I can still watch things like MFC updating every couple seconds -- but MFC also doesn't appear to be showing the GPU temp.) I'm debating pulling the board and refreshing the heatsinks to see if that helps any.
I've not yet been able to run ASD on the system yet. I'm still working on getting ASD 3S139. (That should have been my first step, but I apparently lost my old archive torrent which had individual files, and am waiting on a full 50+GB archive to download. Perhaps tomorrow.)
As old as this thing is, it doesn't hardly seem worth the trouble, but I'm very very stubborn, and I'd really like to reach a point where I can get this thing stable, add some ram to it, maybe an SSD, and have a nice little productivity box running High Sierra tucked discreetly away on my desk.
