Lately my friend Cindy has been having ongoing issues with the Mac Mini she purchased while Ben and I were in Denver. It's worked fine until right before the world locked down when it started slowing down to the point that it was nearly unusable. At the time, I backed up her data, wiped the drive, and reinstalled everything. That seemed to help, but a year ago it began taking upwards of five minutes to come online. She wasn't using it that much. Her husband had a new iMac for the family business, and she decided to just get a new iPad at the time.
Last week she called me because she wanted to upload the remaining data off the thing so it would be accessible on her iPad. Problem was, the Mac wasn't responding at all. She was able to get logged in, but then it locked up. I had her power cycle the machine and it then came back up with a totally black screen.
It sounded like something had died; I was hoping it was just the drive and I could pull it, slave it to my Mac and retrieve her data. The machine itself wasn't that important to her; she had planned on giving it to her nephew once all her stuff had been removed.
When things first started slowing down initially I suggested pulling the mechanical hard drive and slapping in a solid state drive. To be honest, I was hoping that she didn't want to do that because after watching videos on what was involved on getting the drive out of the Mini, I was intimidated as fuck. I'm a desktop PC hardware guy; I can pull one of those apart and put it back together in my sleep. But in the Apple world, I was sweating bullets just replacing the hard drive on my very first MacBook Pro.
Yet here we were. I knew I had to face my fears in order to get that drive out to troubleshoot further as it was coming up with a black screen when hooked up here as well.
Facing My Fears
Disassembling the Mini really wasn't that difficult. My anxiety level was high, but mitigated somewhat by knowing that if I did screw something up, it was not that big a deal since if she couldn't give the machine to her nephew as originally intended, it would go to the recycler.
Once I had the drive out, I connected it via a USB adapter to my Mac. It wasn't even recognized.
I wanted Cindy to be able to still give the machine to her nephew, so I'd ordered a 256GB SSD a couple days prior to put in the machine. The worst part of the reassembly was reattaching the power supply cabling to the system board, but once everything was back together, I hooked it up to the television in our living room (the most accessible thing with a HDMI port because hooking it to my monitor would involve lots of cabling stuff I didn't want to deal with). I powered it up and…flashing folder icon with a question mark.
Success! The power supply and system boards were both good. It was the drive itself that was causing the problem.
From there I was able to do an internet recovery to reload the OS. It even loaded Monterey, which was kind of a surprise.
Now that I've done the drive swap, I feel much more confident that I can do it again if the need ever arises.
Now the Bad News
Since the old drive wasn't being recognized at all with my Mac, I tried slaving it to my work laptop running Windows. I could hear the platters spinning and the heads moving, so I knew there wasn't anything physically wrong with the drive, and sure enough when I went into Disk Management on my Windows laptop, it showed up, along with it's various partitions.
I fired up the Disk Utility on my Mac and reattached it there. After several minutes, it showed up, so I attempted to run First Aid. After churning for several minutes it told me I needed to boot into Recovery Mode and run the repair there. I rebooted into Recovery Mode and fired up Disk Utility again. At this point it wasn't seeing the drive at all, so I called it a night and went to bed.
This morning it had appeared so I ran First Aid. I was not happy.
And of course, she had no backups. And I know her husband has no backup plan in place for his iMac, so we're going to have a little talk today.