Spinning Beach Ball and OS Install Hung on Mac Mini

[Moof1904]

I have a 2009 Mac Mini that has been running SL Server at home and working fine. The server became unresponsive last week, with a spinning beach ball at the Finder. I tried all the normal spinning beach ball resolutions but nothing worked, so I decided to reinstall the OS, but that's been failing, too. Here's a quick summary of what I've done:

• Reinstall a variety of supported OS's, in all but one case, the installation hangs with "X minutes remaining." This is true if the reinstall is from a thumb drive or DVD or if the new OS is being installed on the internal SSD or an SSD in an external FireWire enclosure. They all hang during reinstall.
• I replaced the RAM with brand new ram, just in case I had bad RAM.

Once, an OS reinstall worked but then the Mac just gave me a spinning beach ball at the Finder, no matter what I did. During this time, I managed to launch Activity Monitor but it showed nothing unusual.

Since I've swapped out the RAM and tried installing from thumb drive and DVD and tried installing to internal and external drives, I can't blame any one drive or the RAM. So, what else might be wrong with this mini? I gotta believe it's hardware related.

 

[satcomer]

Then get the free System reporter than Mac techs use EtreCheck. It will show you some old files/hackies that are not compatible with the upgrade and manually delete those old files then reboot.