04-04-2012, 01:49 PM

So, I've got a Mac Mini from 2008. Couple of days ago I had to delete my windows partition because i ran out of space on it. After a couple days of everything going wrong, I finally got it working after i installed OS X Lion. So all's been going well for like 6 days days now when i got it working. Then this morning, I woke up, tried to turn it on, and my windows boot is stuck at the windows logo and won't go past it. It's done this before, and I've always solved that by booting into the mac partition and then restarting back into windows and it fixes it. But now, my mac partition won't even load. Figure okay, it's something wrong with my windows files. Boot it up in safe mode, works just fine. Do a system restore of when i installed 7 on it, and figure it'll just boot right up now. Go to restart and it locks up on the logo again.

Anyone know what's going on with this? :/

04-04-2012, 02:35 PM

The hard drive itself could be having problems. See if you can boot to the Recovery partition (command + R) and do a verify - repair. You may have to reinstall Lion and then Windows if the drive checks OK. If you have a recent Time Machine backup, that will simplify things.

04-04-2012, 03:22 PM

When exactly am I supposed to press command + r? When i hold option to show me the bootable devices, 3 show up. The mac partition, the windows partition, and the recovery hd, not sure if that's what you mean or not. But if it is, when i try to boot it up, it does the exact same thing as when i try to boot the mac partition. It sits there at the white screen with the apple logo and a loading circle below it for a second, then the loading locks up at it sits like that until i restart.

04-04-2012, 03:34 PM

Holding down the option key and selecting the Recovery partition to boot from is the same as pressing Command + R as soon as you hear the POST chime.

You need to get into the Recovery partition in order to check the hard drive. If the machine won't boot to Recovery, then you're probably looking at a complete erase and reinstall of Lion.

04-04-2012, 03:37 PM

How does one go about a full erase if I can't get into a partition to do anything then?

04-04-2012, 11:43 PM

If you can't get the Mini to boot to the Lion Recovery partition, you're only other choice left is to boot with a disk.

If your Mac Mini is a 2008 model, then you must have an original install recovery disk to boot with. Perhaps you upgraded to Snow Leopard before Lion? Use the Snow Leopard disk to boot the machine. After it boots to the DVD, run Disk Utility and check the hard drive.

04-05-2012, 12:34 AM

So I have the disk, but turns out it's scratched all to ****. So I don't know where to go from here, in all honesty.

04-05-2012, 11:49 AM

You will need to purchase another disc from Apple, I would imagine - or take it to your nearest Genius bar for assistance.

Cheers