Mini won't boot to harddrive! Help please

[reebzor]

Ok so I just got my new mini on wednesday, ripped it open and upgraded to 4gb of ram, but didn't touch the harddrive at all. Booted up fine and I used it for 2 days without any problem. I installed windows 7 on thursday night I believe, but used it friday morning. I left friday, came back to my mini today, frozen. I could move the mouse, but nothing else worked (the time also said 10am friday). So I held the power button and rebooted, it took forever to get me to the ?folder. Then after that I booted to the OS X dvd, and disk utility doesnt see my internal harddrive. It is also not shown in the startup disk menu. So what do I do?

Thanks.

EDIT: the harddrive IS recognized in system profiler (as is my dvd-rw drive obviously)

 

[nusynergy]

Woops... Take it to a store and hope they dont notice you ripped it open?

 

[nusynergy]

But more seriously.. Disk Utility on the DVD does not see the drive?

Have you rechecked all the connection on the machine, it may of moved?

 

[reebzor]

But more seriously.. Disk Utility on the DVD does not see the drive?

Have you rechecked all the connection on the machine, it may of moved?

Yea I mean, I was really careful and all, this wasnt the first mini I've opened before. If theres no soft/easy solution, tomorrow I'm going to try first booting it into target disk mode to my friends MBP and if that doesnt work I'll take the drive out and plug it in externally to my macbook.

I guess this just gives me more motivation to buy a new 320gb 7200rpm, I just wanted to wait a little while before doing that.

 

[reebzor]

Here's a little update: Target disk mode didnt work at all so I eventually ripped the harddrive out of the mini and put it into an external enclosure and tried some stuff on my macbook. Disk Utility doesnt see it, disk warrior doesnt see it, tech tool pro doesnt see it, ipartition doesnt see it. So from my understanding my drive seems to be completely fried. Any suggestions?

 

[Hugh]

Dread Drive

Here's a little update: Target disk mode didnt work at all so I eventually ripped the harddrive out of the mini and put it into an external enclosure and tried some stuff on my macbook. Disk Utility doesnt see it, disk warrior doesnt see it, tech tool pro doesnt see it, ipartition doesnt see it. So from my understanding my drive seems to be completely fried. Any suggestions?

I would say your hard drive got fried. You do have some options.

One you can put it back in the MacMini take out your upgrades you did (make it as it was when you got it.) Now I am guessing you didn't make and marks on the inside when you did the upgrade (i.e.: No scratch marks). Then take it back to Apple for them to fix it.

Two, replace the hard drive with a new one and keep the old drive as a paper wight.

Three, leave out the hard drive and boot externally. However this would booting Windows 7 hard to do.

The easiest for me would to take it to Apple.

Hugh

 

[OldMike]

That sounds like quite the coincidence. If it had happened to me, I would have been real happy to see that the drive did not boot up in the external enclosure (meaning that the mini is ok!).

I wouldn't bother bringing the mini back. I don't know how close the Apple store is to you, but with a 120gb 5400 rpm drive going for around $50 - it might cost you almost the same in gas money just to get there and back.

I would just take it as a sign that your mini REALLY wants a bigger faster drive - and are you really going to refuse a new member of the family?

 

[reebzor]

That sounds like quite the coincidence. If it had happened to me, I would have been real happy to see that the drive did not boot up in the external enclosure (meaning that the mini is ok!).

I wouldn't bother bringing the mini back. I don't know how close the Apple store is to you, but with a 120gb 5400 rpm drive going for around $50 - it might cost you almost the same in gas money just to get there and back.

I would just take it as a sign that your mini REALLY wants a bigger faster drive - and are you really going to refuse a new member of the family?

Haha, I enjoyed that. Anyway, I was planning on upgrading the harddrive, but I just didnt really want to drop the money this soon. The apple store is only like a half hour away so I'll go there and try my luck, worst case scenario they tell me no. Thanks for the help guys.

 

[reebzor]

Wow, the genius just handed me a brand new one. Thanks Apple!