Around two years ago my 2018 Mac mini appeared to randomly brick itself; it refused to boot from both the internal SSD and any external media, even though I'd previously given it permission to do so, and attempting to restore over the internet kept failing time and again.
I took it into the Apple Store and though they couldn't tell me exactly what was wrong (dead SSD? some other component?) they said it would cost 500€ to repair, which was far too much for me, and so it sat on a shelf ever since.
Yesterday I was packing it up to take in for recycling when I figured I'd give it one last attempt. I tried Internet Recovery like before and had no luck, I then tried to Revive or Restore it by connecting it to my 2018 MacBook Pro, but that also failed to work.
Finally, I remembered Target Disk Mode exists and realised I'd never tried that with this machine. Sure enough, holding T while switching it on let it mount as a regular external drive on my MacBook!
All excited, I formatted the Mac mini's SSD and hoped that would be enough. However, attempting to boot from the USB installer I created told me to use Internet Recovery instead, which again kept on failing with error messages about my network connection.
Then I had the idea of cloning my 2018 MacBook Pro's install of Sequoia to the mini, but that failed halfway through the clone when the mini's SSD unmounted itself from the MacBook.
At this point I figured the SSD was truly toast and so was about to give up, but then I remembered that I used to run Mojave on this mini, and I still have my 2015 MacBook Pro that's actually running a clone of that same install that I made back in 2022.
So, finally, I cloned the 2015 MacBook Pro's install of Mojave to the mini, restarted the mini, and now everything seems to be working perfectly again!
It could still be that the hardware is faulty, so I'll stress test it over the coming weeks to be sure, but it feels good to have gotten this machine up and running again, especially for considerably less than the quoted 500€ 😃
I took it into the Apple Store and though they couldn't tell me exactly what was wrong (dead SSD? some other component?) they said it would cost 500€ to repair, which was far too much for me, and so it sat on a shelf ever since.
Yesterday I was packing it up to take in for recycling when I figured I'd give it one last attempt. I tried Internet Recovery like before and had no luck, I then tried to Revive or Restore it by connecting it to my 2018 MacBook Pro, but that also failed to work.
Finally, I remembered Target Disk Mode exists and realised I'd never tried that with this machine. Sure enough, holding T while switching it on let it mount as a regular external drive on my MacBook!
All excited, I formatted the Mac mini's SSD and hoped that would be enough. However, attempting to boot from the USB installer I created told me to use Internet Recovery instead, which again kept on failing with error messages about my network connection.
Then I had the idea of cloning my 2018 MacBook Pro's install of Sequoia to the mini, but that failed halfway through the clone when the mini's SSD unmounted itself from the MacBook.
At this point I figured the SSD was truly toast and so was about to give up, but then I remembered that I used to run Mojave on this mini, and I still have my 2015 MacBook Pro that's actually running a clone of that same install that I made back in 2022.
So, finally, I cloned the 2015 MacBook Pro's install of Mojave to the mini, restarted the mini, and now everything seems to be working perfectly again!
It could still be that the hardware is faulty, so I'll stress test it over the coming weeks to be sure, but it feels good to have gotten this machine up and running again, especially for considerably less than the quoted 500€ 😃
Last edited:
