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Mac Mini Freezes at Booting 50%

MadcapLaughs79

MadcapLaughs79

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 15, 2015
8
0
I have a Mac Mini mid 2010 running Yosemite.

When I power it on, the gray apple logo screen appears and the progress bar moves a third of the way then creeps to around 50% after 40 to 60 minutes.

I tried to power on and use CMD R which did not take me anywhere other than the same screen.

Tried holding Option and chose Recovery 10.10.3 drive. Same result.

Tried choosing my external backup drive where Time Machine backups are located. It showed the apple screen then a Kernal Panic error displayed and rebooted.

I'm at a loss of what to try and do.

I attached a pic of the kernel error.
 

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I can only speculate, but I suspect that one of the two following things has occurred:
1) Your drive has been going bad, including sectors on the recovery partition, and that corruption propagated to your Time Machine backup. Try inserting a bootable DVD such as an OS X or Windows installation disc and see if it will boot from that.
2) One of your memory sticks has failed. If you have two, try pulling one out. If you still have problems, try just the other stick.
 
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ActionableMango said:
I can only speculate, but I suspect that one of the two following things has occurred:
1) Your drive has been going bad, including sectors on the recovery partition, and that corruption propagated to your Time Machine backup. Try inserting a bootable DVD such as an OS X or Windows installation disc and see if it will boot from that.
2) One of your memory sticks has failed. If you have two, try pulling one out. If you still have problems, try just the other stick.
Click to expand...


Using a windows disc it is reading and displaying "windows is loading files" with a progress bar. Will it continue to try and load windows and error or will it actually bring me back to the Mac desktop?
 
MadcapLaughs79 said:
Using a windows disc it is reading and displaying "windows is loading files" with a progress bar. Will it continue to try and load windows and error or will it actually bring me back to the Mac desktop?
Click to expand...

I hope you're not installing Windows! I just wanted to see if another disk that wasn't your hard drive would boot, in order to rule out a hardware failure.

It sounds like your hardware is fine but your boot disc is failing or has been corrupted.
 
ActionableMango said:
I hope you're not installing Windows! I just wanted to see if another disk that wasn't your hard drive would boot, in order to rule out a hardware failure.

It sounds like your hardware is fine but your boot disc is failing or has been corrupted.
Click to expand...

I ran fsck from CMD S and it came back saying drive appears ok but also said the file system was modified so I ran it again and it came back saying ok.

I tried rebooting and got the same issue of stalling at 50%.
 
I know from experience, that a corrupt drive that is losing sectors will crash a Mac during boot as long as it is plugged in -- especially if it is the boot drive.

Always had to unplug the bad drive, select another boot drive. Actually, use System Preferences/Startup Disk to select a new drive as startup. Make sure it works and boots, then either use a external case or find alternative spot to plug the drive back in internally. Then recover data from the drive.

Went through this with a tower and an iMac -- both times really a pain to get the machine to boot, but I was able to do it and recover the data on the bad drives.

However, the iMac was the only one time I actually got a SMART status failed alert to a bad drive, all the others tested out as fine -- but were failing and had bad sectors in drive scans.

---

Common sense tells you that, I'm not booting from that drive, I'm using another drive to boot from -- but for some reason, as long as a bad drive is selected as "Startup Drive" it uses data from a bad drive during boot.
 
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Thank you all for your help. I was able to get to the os x utility using a usb boot i found of Mavericks.

Ran test of the Hd and it did have errors. I reinstalled Mavericks on the 2nd drive and it appears to be working. I will attempt to retrieve my files from the bad hd.
 
MadcapLaughs79 said:
I have the server version. 2 500 gb drives.
Click to expand...

Well, the good news is, single-user mode is working. I doubt it's your drives.
Have you tried internet recovery ? Option-CMD-R ? If not, try it and tell us what happens.
CMD-R tries to reboot from you local recovery partition only (if it exists)

Are you running OS X Client or Server on it ?
When was the last time it successfully booted ? Was there any change (new apps, upgrades, network drives) you did between the last successful boot and now ?

A little more esoteric, but if you have any NFS drives mounted in your boot sequence and those drives or the network are not accessible, then it will hang on reboot.

Check your router (with another device) if your Mac Mini's IP address appears and is pingable.
Your screenshot appears to only show progress bar at 5% not 50, when in verbose mode can you post a screenshot of when it hangs for extended time ?

That's all I can think of for now.
 
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