07-09-2007, 11:51 AM

My roomate bought a (intel chipset) mac mini when they first released them for use as a media server of sorts in our living room. Neither of us have really used macs before, but we are computer geeks regardless.

After we had some problems with OSX (I don't even remember what at this point), he got the great idea of trying to install linux on it. I don't know how far he got with it, but it was pretty much rendered useless.

A few months back I wanted to try and get it working again so we could watched Top Gear on the big tv in the living room, but I had no luck. I could get into the OSX setup and install the OS. It would boot into OSX and I could use it, but as soon as I would restart it would seem to lose all the partition information as if I had never done the install in the first place. I tried this three times just to make sure that it was the restart that was doing it.

It's been months since I've messed with it, just wanted to know if anyone had any thoughts? Do you think it may be a hardware issue? Or for some reason the file system is not staying in tact when I reboot. Obviously this is a huge pain in my *** to keep reloading the system (not to mention crawling around and unhooking it from the entertainment center, and then hooking it back up), I just wondered if anyone else had a similar problem.

I told him just to buy a new HDD, that may help (plus the one that came with it was not very big) but who knows.

PS - I don't know what version of OSX it was, I just put 10.3 in there as my best guess.

07-09-2007, 11:56 AM

During install (presuming you're installing from the 10.3 media) have you tried using the Disk Utility software before actually installing to completely reformat the hard drive so that you're effectively starting from scratch? It may be something to do with your linux installation having messed up the MBR (if Mac's even have those, I apologise if I'm talking crap) which, when resetting, causes the Mac Mini to look to the (non-existent) Linux partition to boot from meaning you can never get past this. Doing a complete reformat with Disk Utility may allow you to wipe everything off completely and have the Mini recognise OS X as the boot volume.

07-09-2007, 12:01 PM

Yes, I have to use disk utility to complete the setup because of the linux partitions. I hope this answers your question. I guess my next step is to use something like the "ultimate boot disk" or "hiren's boot cd" to run a standalone partition manager and delete them using that. Maybe that would be a good enough starting place. I dunno.

07-09-2007, 12:12 PM

To have an install run successfully and be able to get into the OS, but to have it not exist after a reboot I'd have to say it's a problem with not updating wherever the Mini is booting from. You say "complete the setup" though, I'm talking about using it before you do anything to completely clear the hard drive? If not, as you suggest it might be a good idea to find something to completely clear everything on the hard drive (including any boot partitions/records) in order to get Mac OS X on there as if the drive were in factory condition. Failing that, try the other option you suggested - hard drives are pretty cheap nowadays, and although the Mini is harder than other Mac's to replace parts for, I'm fairly sure getting the correct drive and replacing it is not impossible.

07-09-2007, 01:09 PM

Thanks for the thoughts. I think I'll try one of the boot cds I have laying around like:

http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

I guess we'll see. Once I start feeling ambitious again.