Mac Mini Won't Boot or Internet Restore - Hard Drive Boots on Macbook

It's the stock Apple cable. It's a 1TB drive I've had no issues with previously. I had it in a Yoga Thinkpad for about 6 months.

Things got worse before giving up last night. After booting up with the disk via usb again successfully, it borked my Macbook Pro's installation of 10.10.2 somehow. I had to reinstall Yosemite from internet recovery on my Macbook Pro, and I am sure nothing is wrong with the disk at least. Restore worked fine, but took at hour for no reason.

Then the 1TB drive wasn't recognized in USB anymore. It only showed up as a default name ( with all kinds of permissions wrong, and it couldn't be fixed. Repairing permissions did get the drive name back, but still couldn't be read. There are some fsck commands to be run if it would boot now into safe mode, but the drive is not recognized in the mac mini at all.

So the drive is fully corrupted. Caused my macbook to become corrupted, and it was cloned from a clean image. There's no viruses possible. It's really crazy.

I am going to guess it is a Yosemite issue firstly because of the weird errors on the disk even though hardware failure seems to be what the symptoms are saying. Now I will waste another morning on this!

Wouldn't boot in single user mode as disk was not recognized on the mac mini, so I lot my chance to fsck. Fsck errored in terminal, so I was hopeful given other advice that it would work in single user mode for the same issue. Disk Utility from local SSD and Recovery Partition disagree

It it is probably strictly a software problem at this point given the fact it works fine now after recloning. It's probably an issue with Carbon Copy Cloner and Yosemite. A lot of people seem to have the same problem, I may be unlucky in that Disk Utility probably broke the installations of both my computers when verifying the disks and the permissions. I would trust fsck a lot more, despite what this says: Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck - Apple Support

I did in fact do this before wiping and cloning. Yosemite doesn't appear to use a normal recovery partition anymore either way. That's why I'm pretty sure it is either CCC, Yosemite, or both.

I think what is happened is that permissions are getting screwed up somehow, and that disk utility breaks things. It seems to be a widespread problem as well regardless of disk type that cmd-r fails with Yosemite. It's so weird you can't boot into safe mode either, that doesn't work. Single user did until the disk was ruined by diskutil, but I missed my chance there trying to solve it in the normal OSX GUI.

There are no status updates with the internet recovery. It either works or it doesn't. It takes about 30 seconds to load when it works. It doesn't tell you if your ethernet connection is working either, it only sort of can confirm you are connected to wifi. It's really poorly implemented.

I will bookmark this thread and update if the problems continue.

This should have been the first thing I tried, but I had converted to windows for the last year primarily, so this was my first foray into Yosemite.

I did actually find this exact thread, but this was when the disk stopped being recognized, so the world may never know if it would have worked, but it's the first thing I will try in the future. I hope this thread helps someone along the way if they come across the same issue. I also hope Apple improves their documentation. fsck in single user mode is a much safer choice than Disk Utility, which may be corrupted in some instances in Yosemite.

All is well now, both computers operating perfectly with an image and clone in case it goes wrong again. The most educated guess I can make at this point is that the permissions were not correct when cloned, and then it cascaded into something nasty. Then in a panic I made all the wrong moves, and somehow this affected my main install on my macbook which needed to be reinstalled as well.