Mac Mini mid 2011 not booting up in recovery mode

[rghoover]

My mid 2011 mac mini the other day while working in Photoshop froze with a gray screen with vertical black pinstripes. After a bit I restarted it (holding the power button) and after the apple logo appeared and the progress bar got about 1/3rd across the screen went solid gray and then black, chimed and restarted into a perpetual cycle of nonsuccess.

After searching forums I've tried holding;
the Shift Key at startup: no luck
the Option Key allows me to select my HD and a Recovery, both choices yield the same cycle described above.
CMD+R starts internet recovery, and crashes also.
I did reset the memory (CMD+Opt+P+R).
I've pressed CMD+V to enter Verbose mode but don't know really what I'm looking at. It does say unable to open /Var/db/BootCache.playlist:2 No such file or directory. After searching I saw to create a recovery drive.
I created a recovery drive on a pen drive through support.apple.com/kb/dl1433 Pressing Option at startup I can then select the new option of HD Recovery, and it begins to load, and then about 1/3 of the way crashes.
Please Help!!!!

 

[harryb2448]

G'day and welcome to the forums.

What operating system? When you go into Recovery go to Utilities and run Repair Disk. May be hard drive failing. Also try Single User Mode (Command + S) and trust you have not enabled FileVault.


https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201573

 

[rghoover]

Thanks

I am running Yosemite I believe. I can't even get in to Recovery. That dialogue doesn't appear. Safe mode either.
I tried single user mode, but didn't know what to do So I typed Exit. There is nothing extremely important on the drive, I just need to be back up and running. I do have an old macbook pro that I could pull the hard drive from but before going to all the trouble I wanted to know for sure that the HD was the problem.

 

[pm-r]

If your Macs have compatible ports and OS and you have the proper cables, you could try just booting and using Target Disk Mode if it will work with your setup, and save pulling the drive.

 

[chas_m]

Can't be certain, but it certainly does sound like a dead hard drive, since it can't even reach the recovery drive.

 

[rghoover]

Well I tried swapping HDs and the exact same thing happens. It won't load anything. Pressing 'D' during startup to run diagnostics it performs the short and extended tests, both find NO problems...

Here is a screen shot of Verbose Mode

 

[pm-r]

About the only thing you haven't done or tried that I can see is an SMC Reset.

It may be worth a try and sure won't break things any more than they are.
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201295