Mac's new slogan "it don't work" HELP

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Ok, my friend has a mac mini and went to fire it up this weekend and nothing. then he restarted fired up, got through 3 pictures in appature, then, died again. then he restarted again, and the system said there has been a major problem and the systems needs a restart, did that and now...she's gone for good.

any ideas?
 

cwa107


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Your Mac's Specs
14" MacBook Pro M1 Pro, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD
Sounds like a bad hard drive to me. Assuming it's an Intel machine, I'd start by running the Apple Hardware Test.
 
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it wont even fire up now. maybe I will get him to swap out the drive and try again. thanks for the info.
 

cwa107


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Your Mac's Specs
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it wont even fire up now. maybe I will get him to swap out the drive and try again. thanks for the info.

What do you mean by "fire up"? There's no power to the system whatsoever?

The Apple Diagnostics are not dependent on the HD or any installed software to operate. In fact, it boots right from the CD. So, as long as the machine will power up and the optical drive is in good shape, this should work. If the machine won't even turn on (i.e. no power / no display at all), then your issue is much more serious.
 
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Im on the phone with him. i misunderstood what he was saying. it starts up but is getting some weird stuff happening now. How does he open up the mini case...

thanks.
 
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Mac Mini Core i7 2012 | White 2009 MacBook 2 Ghz | 733 Mhz G4 Quicksilver
Try to get it to boot from the restore disk, as CWA said in his Apple Hardware test link
 
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the hardware test showed nothing wrong...I guess we are to assume that its a software issue then....
 

cwa107


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Very likely just a corrupted file system. Try the steps in this FAQ. Start at #6.
 

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