The Mini Server (Mid 2010) at work just flaked out, and I wanted to get a second opinion before declaring it completely dead and scrapping it for parts (tragically, I forgot to buy Applecare for it, and it's like 35 days out of warranty 
).
Symptom is that it started hanging randomly after a few minutes of being on. Booting from a different partition on a separate internal drive seemed to keep it up longer, but didn't cure it. It then started having trouble booting; pushing the power button would spin up the fans, drives, and turn on the power light, but no chime and no video output (not even a grey screen). If I reset the SMC it will usually chime and then attempt to boot.
Tried removing each stick of RAM individually (to test both sticks and both slots), no change.
Tried running Hardware Test from an external CD drive; it didn't find any errors, but would hang randomly partway through the tests (and not on the same test, or after the same amount of time--once during the 12th RAM test, twice during the HD surface scan).
One of the to internal hard drives had previously shown a few reallocated sectors (but passed SMART checks, and the reallocation count wasn't going up, so I'd left it like that for a while since I was only using one of the internals and didn't want to take it out of service to fiddle with something that wasn't technically broken), so I thought that might have flaked out.
Cracked it open, pulled that drive, tested it hooked to a USB adapter, but it seemed to read fine. Reassembled the Mini with only the "good" hard drive and it seemed to power on and run, so I left it running a full Hardware Test scan. The scan completed, but it hung again while sitting doing nothing on the "test completed" screen, and again refused to even chime when powered on, like before.
I can try swapping out the remaining hard drive (the one with no reallocated sectors), but I'm assuming that it's the motherboard. Anybody seen similar behavior? Is there anything else I should try before declaring this an ex-Mini?
).Symptom is that it started hanging randomly after a few minutes of being on. Booting from a different partition on a separate internal drive seemed to keep it up longer, but didn't cure it. It then started having trouble booting; pushing the power button would spin up the fans, drives, and turn on the power light, but no chime and no video output (not even a grey screen). If I reset the SMC it will usually chime and then attempt to boot.
Tried removing each stick of RAM individually (to test both sticks and both slots), no change.
Tried running Hardware Test from an external CD drive; it didn't find any errors, but would hang randomly partway through the tests (and not on the same test, or after the same amount of time--once during the 12th RAM test, twice during the HD surface scan).
One of the to internal hard drives had previously shown a few reallocated sectors (but passed SMART checks, and the reallocation count wasn't going up, so I'd left it like that for a while since I was only using one of the internals and didn't want to take it out of service to fiddle with something that wasn't technically broken), so I thought that might have flaked out.
Cracked it open, pulled that drive, tested it hooked to a USB adapter, but it seemed to read fine. Reassembled the Mini with only the "good" hard drive and it seemed to power on and run, so I left it running a full Hardware Test scan. The scan completed, but it hung again while sitting doing nothing on the "test completed" screen, and again refused to even chime when powered on, like before.
I can try swapping out the remaining hard drive (the one with no reallocated sectors), but I'm assuming that it's the motherboard. Anybody seen similar behavior? Is there anything else I should try before declaring this an ex-Mini?