Q: Failing internal hard drive in mini ?
Friends perhaps you can help me with my mid 2010 Mac Mini.
Several days ago I started getting the spinning ball when I clicked on "mail". I had to wait, then the app would load. When I click on Safari .. I get the spinning ball, then it loads. Clicking to different web sites, the ball again appears and the I must wait. The mini takes forever to access any app. I reset Safari and checked to see if anything is running as well. All looks good. I "carbon copied" the drive to an external one. Booted from the external. Everything worked but the external boot drive is using a USB port, so it's not very fast, but better than the internal.
So,I erased the internal drive and cloned the contents back to the internal drive. Everything working fine for a day. Then the problem started again… Currently I am back on my USB external drive. I have "Drive Genius" so I ran tests on the internal drive and it does very well. However, Drive Genius will not initialize the drive… Why???? It says "drive failed"… So, I used the Apple utility to initialize the drive and it did erase the drive. How can I be sure that the internal drive is failing .. I have 10.7 on a USB stick but my mini says it's too new???? and will not install it on my internal drive. Currently the boot drive is on 10.8.5. Am I missing something??? Maybe it's not a drive issue? I could install a fresh system on the internal but I'm not sure if I should. The internal drive does pass apple utility tests. I ordered a external firewire drive since the USB drive is only temporary. What steps should I take to fix this problem .. Thanks
Mike
Mac Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.1), 3.33Ghz 6 core Intel Xeon
Posted on Oct 15, 2014 6:18 AM