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Mac Boot Experts Required: Help me save my firstborn Mac!

speg

speg

Diamond Member
It's been nearly six years since that fateful day in January 2005, when Steve unveiled the $499 Mac Mini and I promptly bought my first Mac.

Flash forward to a few days ago, and the hard drive started making some awful noises hard drives should not be making. It was six years, my first real drive failure. It was time.

So I ordered a replacement drive and it arrived today, however I am having some difficulties.


The new drive is installed and there is a OS X 10.5 *retail* dvd in the optical drive, but I can't boot into the installer.

  • holding 'C' on boot does nothing - after a grey screen I eventually reach the flashing ? mark / Finder folder
  • holding 'T' on boot does nothing - a black screen and then the computer shuts off
  • holding mouse/buttons or F12 to eject disk does nothing
  • holding Option+Command+P+R DOES reboot the computer and (I assume) reset the PRAM
  • holding Option DOES get me to an (empty?) boot screen. All that is displayed is a refresh button and a right arrow button
  • Holding Option+Command+O+F gets me into open firmware where I have no clue what to do. I did reset-nvram reset-all in here and it said "ok" as if it worked. "eject cd" did NOT work from here.
  • Command V on boot does nothing.

So I'm running out of ideas on what to do next... I don't understand why some of my boot keys don't seem to be working. I thought maybe it was because of Open Firmware, but I can get into OF just fine.. and the boot screen when holding option on boot loads (empty) and does NOT have a lock/password field.

So am starting to suspect something might be up with optical drive too. Coincidence they both stop working at the same time? My backup plan was to boot into target disk mode, but that isn't working either 🙁

Any ideas?
 
Last edited:
I am assume when you were trying target disk mode that you have it connected via Firewire to another Mac before you tried booting.

If you have another Mac handy, you can just install OS X to the drive that way, and then pop it into the Mini. You will need to crack the Mini open again, which I hear is incredibly annoying, but if nothing else is working...
 
TheStu said:
I am assume when you were trying target disk mode that you have it connected via Firewire to another Mac before you tried booting.

If you have another Mac handy, you can just install OS X to the drive that way, and then pop it into the Mini. You will need to crack the Mini open again, which I hear is incredibly annoying, but if nothing else is working...
Click to expand...

Hmm, no I did not (no Firewire cable handy) - I was just following something I read online where I was to hold T and get the Firewire logo bouncing around the screen, and then plug it in.. but if it needs to be connected at boot I'll have to go find a firewire cable!
 
A couple things

Do you infact see the firewire icon bouncing around the screen?

Is your mac mini a ppc g4? And if so is the leopard disk somehow a version that only has intel install on it?

If you have another mac put the mini in target disk mode and put the retail disk in the other mac and install the os over the firewire.
 
JSt0rm said:
A couple things

Do you infact see the firewire icon bouncing around the screen?

Is your mac mini a ppc g4? And if so is the leopard disk somehow a version that only has intel install on it?

If you have another mac put the mini in target disk mode and put the retail disk in the other mac and install the os over the firewire.
Click to expand...

It is a PPC G4. The Leopard DVD AFIAK is both PPC/Intel. I do NOT see the firewire icon. The screen just goes black/turns off and so does the Mini shortly thereafter. But this is without a firewire cable actually connecting it to another Mac - will try that as soon as I get my hands on a cable.
 
You should see the symbol regardless.

Your next step would be to remove the drive and format it in another mac then put it back in and install over firewire. Unless you can test a different cd drive somehow.
 
It is a PPC mac mini. If you hold down option you say you only get the reload icon and the arrow. In my experience macs are sometimes very slow to recognize the presence of a dvd in the drive to boot from. When you option boot, wait few seconds then hit the reload button. The drive should spin up and attempt to recognize the dvd again.

If you have access to another mac, you can restore the dvd image to a firewire drive and install it that way as well.
 
I have a working PPC mac mini with OSX 10.4.11 on it. I thought that was the newest OSX that can run on PPC ?
 
Back in the day, 10.5.8 was much more functional in many ways than 10.4.11. But the both are completely obsolete now. I don't recommend anyone use anything less than 10.10, at least if you want run modern software.
 
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