2009 mac mini won’t boot

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Level 1

8 points

2009 mac mini won’t boot

a few months ago I started up my mac mini again and it has been having problems ever since. Firstly it show that it had kernel issues but I “fixed” that by restarting it. However, a few weeks ago it started to have problems when booting up. I would turn it on and when the gray screen with the Apple logo and the loading bar appeared it would stay there forever. But again, I would turn it off and back on and it booted fine. Now it stays on that screen forever and when it reaches the end it shuts down.

this is all i have done: safe mode, first aid, /sbin/fsck -fy in single user mode. Nothing worked.

Yesterday I tried reinstalling OS but when i have to choose the hard drive Macintosh HD doesn’t appear and Recovery HD is locked.

Any information is greatly appreciated.

Posted on May 6, 2020 7:41 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

QuickPost

Level 10

103,329 points

May 6, 2020 12:23 PM in response to _TTRZ

Hello,

Try running the following tests:

How to reset the System Management Controller (SMC) on your Mac - Apple Support

Reset NVRAM or PRAM on your Mac - Apple Support

How to use Apple Hardware Test on your Mac - Apple Support

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Answer 2

HWTech

Level 9

56,402 points

May 7, 2020 9:15 AM in response to _TTRZ

Yes if the drive is healthy, then selecting the physical drive to erase should bypass a drive protected by Filevault.

If you don't see the physical drive then click on "View" within Disk Utility and select "Show All Devices" so that the physical drive appears in the left pane of Disk Utility. This is required with more recent versions of macOS (I forget when Apple made this change, but it was a terrible decision to hide the drive).

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208496

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Answer 3

_TTRZ Author

Level 1

8 points

May 6, 2020 3:59 PM in response to mdp1101

I hope that’s not the case.

also in disc utility Macintosh HD appears as “not mounted “ as well as full. But I remember it had almost 90gb of free storage (it is a 160gb hard drive).

Not sure if that has anything to do with the problem

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Answer 4

HWTech

Level 9

56,402 points

May 6, 2020 7:03 PM in response to _TTRZ

If Filevault is enabled, then perhaps you first need to launch Disk Utility while in Recovery Mode to try to mount/unlock the "Macintosh HD". Then click "Reinstall macOS" to see if "Macintosh HD" shows up as an option for the destination.

Like @mdp1101 I suspect you may have a failing hard drive.

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Answer 5

_TTRZ Author

Level 1

8 points

May 6, 2020 2:05 PM in response to QuickPost

Thank you for the advice.

SMC and resetting the NVRAM don’t seem to be doing anything.

and I’ve tried many times to boot into AHT but I’m no able.

Do you know anything else I can try?

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Answer 6

mdp1101

Level 3

921 points

May 6, 2020 2:56 PM in response to _TTRZ

You probably have a failing hard drive (HD)

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Answer 7

_TTRZ Author

Level 1

8 points

May 7, 2020 8:52 AM in response to HWTech

Hi. I wasn’t able to do what you recommended. Do you know if erasing the hard drive could fix the problem? I don’t really care about losing data because I don’t have anything important on it.

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2009 mac mini won’t boot

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