Mac Mini G4 1.4Ghz takes HALF HOUR to turn on!

[quantum003]

What in the heck could be causing this? I bought a Mac Mini for very cheap, so of course I know you get what you pay for, but this is ridiculous. It's a 1.4Ghz (or close, I don't have a half hour to turn it on again to be certain), with 512MB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and a superdrive I added (but it doesn't recognize, it doesn't realize it has an optical drive in it at all).

So, you power it on and wait... literally a half hour. Then the desktop has finally loaded. But don't try to use it yet, it still runs ridiculously slow, if you click on a menu item you get the beach ball, 30 seconds later the drop down menu finally appears. But, if you let it sit for an hour or more it finally snaps out if it and runs at what I would expect to be an average speed.

I know 512MB is not enough RAM, I want to add a 1GB stick, but come on... it wouldn't make THAT much difference would it? I firewire booted the Mini into one of my other comps to install Tiger, and I did all the updates, it was running fine in Firewire mode and booting from it that way. But boot it up regularly and you'll have a 5 o'clock shadow before you can use it for anything.

Anyone ever heard of this? Is 160GB too big for the hard drive, do I have to partition it up or something? And what do you do about a Mac Mini that doesn't recognize the superdrive you just installed? The disk spins and spins but the Mini doesn't know it's there.

Thanks for any help.

 

[flopticalcube]

I'd say there is a problem with the hard drive. There is no size limit but the drive itself may be having issues. If you can boot off of an external FW drive faster, that should confirm it.

 

[stridemat]

I would also say there is a problem with your drive. Back up your data now and repair permissions just in case.

Hows the s.m.a.r.t status of the drive?

I would try reinstalling OSX before declaring that the drive is dead.

 

[OrangeSVTguy]

The HDD and Optical drive are on the same connection inside. Did you eff something up? Bend a pin or something? The slow hard drive could be the result of the optical drive not being installed correctly.

 

[dukebound85]

sounds like the hdd


run a smart test

 

[quantum003]

Thanks guys. I reformatted and reinstalled Tiger via Target Disk firewire transfer, and it was working just fine that way, normal speed and all.

That's a good point about the HDD and the optical being on the same connector inside the mini. Boy I hope I didn't bend or break anything on that connector... I'm going to try installing a different HDD and optical and see if anything changes.

Thanks again.