Mac mini (mid 2011), unplugging hdmi causes reboot
I've been trying to tackle an issue for weeks now.. I'm hoping maybe someone comes across this post and can shed some light on my issue. I've been using a mid 2011 mac mini connected to a Denon 3808 receiver via HDMI that is in turn connected to a Samsung TV and for the better part of 5-6 years it worked pretty much flawlessly. Sure, HDMI signal dropped out here and there and you had to get it to handshake again and the screen would come back.. no big deal. HOWEVER, over the past year I've been noticing that my mac mini constantly restarts through out the day.. I use to think it was random, BUT it turns out that every time the mac mini loses an hdmi connection.. the mac mini ABRUPTLY restarts. There's zero warning or anything and there is nothing in the logs to indicate that anything happened just before the mac mini restarted. The problem is completely reproducible.. you literally can just unplug the hdmi cable or simply turn off the denon receiver and boom the mac mini restarts. I've made sure CEC on the receiver is turned off, so that's not it. I've also completely reinstalled this mac mini a number of times.. it literally happens with a completely fresh install of high sierra. Prior to figuring out it was an hdmi issue I upgraded the memory and hdd in the mac mini to 8GB of ram and a 1TB SSD.. so that's all brand new. When the system is running, it now flys.. but it's basically unusable as an HTPC since it's constantly restarting!
Does anyone have any suggestions? As I type this I'm making a bootable mavericks USB key and going to try and downgrade. I can't get internet recovery to give me osx lion 10.7.. and the app store will only let me go as far back as mavericks.. so that's what I'm going to try.
Please.. if anyone has any ideas.. please post!
Mac mini, macOS High Sierra (10.13.6), null