Start Up Problems w/ Mini

Alas, after 20 hours of Zeroing Out, the bar is still stalled out at the same position during the "Preparing to erase" stage. I still have not turned it off yet. Although I think it would be a good idea if I did. Unfortunate that it's happening. I am hoping a new hard drive will bring it back to life.

Well I think you did what you could. It looks obvious now that it is a hardware problem, more specifically the hard drive that failed like trav pointed out.

Very sorry about that.

Is it still under warranty? Did you get extended Apple Care for it?

And do get an external as well: you will be able to do backups of your stuff.

MacHeadCase said:

Well I think you did what you could. It looks obvious now that it is a hardware problem, more specifically the hard drive that failed like trav pointed out.

Very sorry about that.

Is it still under warranty? Did you get extended Apple Care for it?

And do get an external as well: you will be able to do backups of your stuff.

Click to expand...

Nope. Unfortunately the Mini is no longer under warranty. I paid for Apple Care once, but came to the conclusion that it's much too expensive. The same price as a hard drive.

One last question before I think this thread is done. If I buy an external hard drive (preferably the miniStack) will I be able to run OSX Tiger off of that solely and have everything working? And once again, thanks a lot for all the help.

Well you Mini, is it running of a PowerPC or Intel chip? Theoretically, an Intel-based Mac can boot from a USB-only external drive but just copying photos on a USB external seems to be painfully slow so maybe your startup time could be a bit slow as well.

A PowerPC based Mac can only boot off of a FireWire interface external, it will not boot from a USB external at all.

I'm running on an older PowerPC version. I know the upsides of firewire being faster. But any downsides from running the OSX directly from the HD via firewire?

I'm no expert on this subject, by far, but I believe running it off of an external will be definitely slower than running the OS from an internal hd.

I see no real reason why a usb os shouldn't run quickly enough. The transfer rate is 400mb/s. As for photo copying to usb hard drive - it's just as slow to copy a load of photos between internal hard drives... These drives are so cheap now though, wouldn't hurt to give it a go.