Mac Mini Freezes when loading

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Mac Mini Freezes when loading

When I boot up my mac mini the loading screen (apple logo above a progress bar) comes on. The progress bar fills to about 75% then the screen flickers and the loading bar turns from a thin bar with round edges and a border to a thick (3 or 4x thicker) white bar with no border and square edges. It doesn't seem to make any progress from there.

I've done the following to attempt to fix it:

Run the disk repar utility on the drive
Run fsck -fy in single user mode
Reset the NVRAM
Reset the SMC

It won't load into safe mode, freezes on the loading bar (I've left it a significant amount of time to make sure it wasn't just slow).

Anyone have any experience of this and know how to fix it?

Mac mini, OS X El Capitan (10.11.3)

Posted on Feb 7, 2016 4:56 AM

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Answer 1

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lllaass

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Feb 7, 2016 8:11 AM in response to Lukegeorge85

Did the disk repair complete?

If so then reinstall the OSX. Nothing should be lost

How to reinstall OS X on your Mac - Apple Support

- If you do not have a backup use disk utility to restore the internal disk to an external disk so you can try to recover data.

Then format the startup disk and do a fresh install of OSX

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Answer 2

Lukegeorge85 Author

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Feb 7, 2016 8:05 AM in response to lllaass

TThe reap air did complete. Just reinstalled OS X but still get the same loading screen issue

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Answer 3

Lukegeorge85 Author

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Feb 7, 2016 8:30 AM in response to Lukegeorge85

II've run first aid in disk utility again. As before it says repairing file system, then it checks a bunch of things, then says the volume appears to be ok, file system check exit code is 0, updating boot support partitions for volume as required, and finally operation successful.

one thing I noticed that appears to be different to a lot of screenshots showing how to do this is that in the list on the left hand side I have a disk image titled OS X base system. This is in addition to my hard drive. Is this normal?

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Answer 4

lllaass

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Feb 7, 2016 12:47 PM in response to Lukegeorge85

Try running Apple hardware test.

Using Apple Hardware Test - Apple Support

Next try installing OSX on an external USB drive and booting fro that.

What model Mac Mini?

Only one internal disk?

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Answer 5

Lukegeorge85 Author

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Feb 7, 2016 11:43 AM in response to lllaass

TThe hardware test reported no trouble found.

its a late 2012 Mac mini 6.1. One weird thing is that on the hardware profile of the hardware test it says the cpu is an i7 but it actually has an i5 installed

it only has one hard drive.

I'Ll try boot from usb

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Answer 6

Lukegeorge85 Author

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Feb 7, 2016 12:47 PM in response to Lukegeorge85

II've been able to boot up from an external drive And can access the internal drive from within finder.

How do I proceed from here to get my internal drive working?

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Answer 7

lllaass

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210,411 points

Feb 7, 2016 1:01 PM in response to Lukegeorge85

What I would do would be to backup data for the internal drive to someplace safe. Verify the data was successfully copied. Then format the internal HD and reinstall OSX.

Try booting from the new install. If successful restore data

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Answer 8

Lukegeorge85 Author

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Feb 8, 2016 1:09 PM in response to lllaass

It's back up and running.

I was able to use the move my mac function (think thats what its called) to transfer all my profile and files to the external drive, then when I formatted and installed I was able to use the same function to transfer from the external drive back to the hard drive so the damage isn't actually too bad.

Thanks for your help.

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