Mac Mini 2009 Boot Woes

[Buadhai]

This ancient machine has an SSD and 8GB of RAM both of which I installed several years ago. My wife has been using this machine daily for a long time. Today it wouldn't boot. The progress bar gets about half way and then the machine shuts down.

What I've tried so far:

• Reset the Parameter Ram
• Reset the SMC
• In safe mode the boot progress bar gets to the end and then just sits there for many minutes before the machine shuts down
• I ran fsck several times in single user mode. The hard drive was reported to be OK.
• I can't get it to boot in either Recovery mode or Diagnostic mode
• I was able to boot from a High Sierra install USB stick (of course, it wouldn't install the OS) and ran Disk Utility from there. Still no problem reported on the boot volume.

From the above, it's clear the machine will boot, so I assume the RAM is OK and the graphics are OK. Must be the internal drive, but, what next?

Any ideas?

 

[DeltaMac]

What OS X system is the boot system on your mini?
Normally, that would be El Capitan as a maximum.
Originally shipped with Leopard or Snow Leopard. Neither of those would have a recovery system - too old.
Is it possible the boot system is that old?

Do you have an older USB installer?
How did you get a 2009 mini to boot to a High Sierra installer -- unless your mini is actually a 2010 mini (which would boot to High Sierra, unpatched!)

 

[Buadhai]

What OS X system is the boot system on your mini?
Normally, that would be El Capitan as a maximum.
Originally shipped with Leopard or Snow Leopard. Neither of those would have a recovery system - too old.
Is it possible the boot system is that old?

Do you have an older USB installer?
How did you get a 2009 mini to boot to a High Sierra installer -- unless your mini is actually a 2010 mini (which would boot to High Sierra, unpatched!)

I'm sure it's a 2009 Mac mini running El Cap. But, I haven't touched that machine since I upgraded the hardware two or three years ago.

The machine booted with the High Sierra installer, but wouldn't, of course, let me install High Sierra. It did offer a few options including Disk Utility, Terminal, Startup Disk, Restore, etc.

I tried to use Restore to restore from the Time Machine backup drive, but that failed with page after page of error messages and erased most of the hard drive.

So, I completely erased the hard drive using Disk Utility and am now restoring from Time Machine. It says there are four hours and fifteen minutes to go.

One oddity. When I was given a list of Time Machine backup files, everything up through September 24th was listed using Western dates (where the year is 2019). But, beginning with the TM backups on September 25th the backups are dated using the Buddhist calendar (where the year is 2562). So, something serious happened to this machine when it booted up on the 25th.

If the restore fails I'll need to create an El Cap USB installer, but I have no idea where I can get El Cap.

Any ideas?

 

[Partron22]

Security update 2019-005 and Safari 13.0.0 and 13.0.1 came out near September 24. Was the Mini set to auto update?
There've been some problems with at least the security update.

 

[Ruggy]

If you have a disk drive (usb will do), then you can easily get hold of installation disks off ebay for $5 or so.​

They don't have a code and aren't linked to the user as I'm sure you know, so there's no problem buying them.​

On the original installation disks, (the ones with pictures on not the grey ones) you've got hardware diagnostics that probably work better than the ones on the HD because, well, it's probably the HD that's at fault. Extended mode works way better than the quick mode by a long way.​

But in the end, maybe just opening the thing up and slipping in a new HD might be the solution. They are pretty cheap now. You'll still need the disks off ebay (or borrow them if you have a friend with some. Most of us with Macs have a pile sitting around somewhere).​

You could also try 'Disk Warrior'. It works well but frankly, you're probably better spending the same money on a new HD.​

The OS on USB is probably also available on ebay but I don't know.​

Best.​

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Additional: any of the old, original installation disks will do going back to Tiger.
They all have hardware diagnostics, and once you've installed and logged in, you can go to the app store and it'll allow you to download and update the OS to whatever the machine is capable of handling.

 

[Buadhai]

The restore from Time Machine failed again with a zillion -36 errors. DU found no problems with either drive.

I managed to find an old Snow Leopard CD. I'll try to install that next.

I don't know if the machine was set to do automatic updates. My wife didn't know either and had no explanation for the change from Gregorian to Buddhist dates.

 

[Buadhai]

Now I'm baffled. If I boot from the Snow Leopard install CD, the internal SSD doesn't mount. It shows up in System Profiler, but it's not given as an install option and doesn't show up in Disk Utility. But, if I boot from the High Sierra install USB stick, the internal drive does mount and does show up in DU.

What now?

 

[Buadhai]

So, what I really need is an El Cap installer. But how? Well, I happen to have a remote machine running High Sierra with an old version of the Mac App Store. I managed to get that machine to download the Install El Capitan application. But, it's there, not here. I have a reverse SSH tunnel set up to this machine from that machine which happens to be behind a double NAT. I'm now using scp to try to copy the installer from there to here. It's gonna take forever.

Any better ideas?

Note: I should have mentioned that I live in Thailand so ordering from eBay would take a very long time.

 

[jaxhunter]

I would try a new hard drive, to be honest. Even though Disk Utility and fsck have not reported any errors it's still behaving as if the drive has gone bad. There are some things those software tools can't detect.
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You can also still download El Cap from Apple, you just have to do a search for the installer. It's tricky to do, but possible. The follow the instructions from here to create a USB install disk:

Create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support

You can use a USB flash drive or other secondary volume as a startup disk from which to install the Mac operating system. These steps are primarily for system administrators and other experienced users who are familiar with entering commands in Terminal.

support.apple.com

 

[a2jack]

The 09 MMs go for about 50-$70 on the used market. Don't waste your time. You can start over clean.

I bought a referb, like new, for $60 from MOAT, last year. a2

 

[Buadhai]

I tried the tricks to download El Cap here and never managed. As mentioned, I did manage to download it to a remote machine running High Sierra. 1.5GB copied here so far.

I'm not convinced that the existing SSD is failing. That said, I found a new 500GB WD SSD for about US$70 that I can order locally. No need to wait for delivery from OWC anymore.

When I booted into single use mode and mounted the internal drive r/w, I was able to move all over the file system, copy files, etc. So, in actual use, the drive seems fine. Plus, DU and fsck found no problems. I want to make sure before I buy a new drive.

It doesn't seem like much money, but when you're retired and living on a fixed income in a third world country, seventy bucks actually means something.

Or, maybe I'll just install Debian or Ubuntu. I find myself a bit irritated that Apple makes it so hard to obtain legacy installers.

 

[Buadhai]

And, the madness continues. The El Cap installer transfer failed after about 5.5GB. Bummer. Fortunately, I was able to restart it using rsync. I should have used rsync from the beginning, but I didn't realize that you could rsync through a reverse SSH tunnel. Worked a charm.

I used Jaxhunter's suggestion on this page: How to create a bootable installer for macOS

I tried to install twice. The first time the installer quit saying it couldn't be verified. Hmmm. Second time it quit because of an error. The install log file had no useable clues.

So, it does indeed look like the internal SSD, which is only a few years old, is actually faulty. I'll order a new one. Can anyone assure me that this will work?

SSD 250GB WD BLUE 3D NAND (WDS250G2B0A)

I tried installing on an external drive. That worked fine. It's all set up and running well. Surprisingly snappy!

Next step is to try to clone the external boot drive to the internal SSD.

 

[Buadhai]

And now, for the exciting conclusion:

I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the external boot disk to what we thought was a failed internal SSD. CCC did the task without complaint. I shut down, removed the extrnal drive and rebooted. Sure enough, the internal SSD booted up normally.

So, I guess the cause of the original boot failure may never be known. It certainly may be a failing internal drive.

Anyway, this kept me busy for a couple of days and I learned a lot.

Otherwise I'd be watching Netflix and reading dime novels.