09-25-2016, 07:04 PM
Came home yesterday to the wife complaining about a spinning beach ball and hangs on the Mini (late 2009, C2D 2.0, 8gb RAM, Snow Leopard). Firefox was open so I asked if she had the usual 300 tabs open and she said no, only 6. So I did a hard shutdown and rebooted. It took a good 6-8 minutes to get the desktop up and immediately I started getting little 3-4 second beachballs.
When I fired up Disk Utility the internal drive was listed in red text and the message "This drive has a hardware problem and can not be repaired!". I tried to run a scan but the machine froze again and this time when I restarted it just kept grinding away with no desktop. We've been having little issues with the Mini for a few months now but I was attributing them to running Parallels and Win 7 with Mac OS on only the 8gb RAM. I had to allocate 4/4 to each side and I thought it might have been taxing the Mini. Now I think it was the drive failing. Note: SMART status never said there was any issues with the drive.
In the past I'd be busting a vein when this happened because backups were for squids and real computer geeks never backed up their files. I was a charter member of that stupid club but since then I've turned in my membership card and now have a full Time Machine backup AND a spare bootable drive! Now I can focus my full wrath on the drive manufacturer!
I bought this drive from Newegg on 4-15-2015. It's an HGST Travelstar H2IK10003272SN (0S03563) 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 2.5" High Performance Mobile Hard Drive with a 3 year warranty. I thought these HGST's were supposed to have the lowest failure rate of the major mfr's? Maybe I just drew the short straw on this unit.
Well I submitted a support case for a replacement and we'll see where that leads. I was thinking that this may be the perfect time to drop in an SSD but the cheap bastard in me says the replacement hard drive is free and I should spend the cash on hookers and booze. I could put the drive in a case but I don't really need another small 1TB drive hanging around collecting dust.
While I have the case open, does anyone have any cheap sources for a replacement optical drive? DVD just keeps spitting the disc out and won't mount.
When I fired up Disk Utility the internal drive was listed in red text and the message "This drive has a hardware problem and can not be repaired!". I tried to run a scan but the machine froze again and this time when I restarted it just kept grinding away with no desktop. We've been having little issues with the Mini for a few months now but I was attributing them to running Parallels and Win 7 with Mac OS on only the 8gb RAM. I had to allocate 4/4 to each side and I thought it might have been taxing the Mini. Now I think it was the drive failing. Note: SMART status never said there was any issues with the drive.
In the past I'd be busting a vein when this happened because backups were for squids and real computer geeks never backed up their files. I was a charter member of that stupid club but since then I've turned in my membership card and now have a full Time Machine backup AND a spare bootable drive! Now I can focus my full wrath on the drive manufacturer!
I bought this drive from Newegg on 4-15-2015. It's an HGST Travelstar H2IK10003272SN (0S03563) 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 2.5" High Performance Mobile Hard Drive with a 3 year warranty. I thought these HGST's were supposed to have the lowest failure rate of the major mfr's? Maybe I just drew the short straw on this unit.
Well I submitted a support case for a replacement and we'll see where that leads. I was thinking that this may be the perfect time to drop in an SSD but the cheap bastard in me says the replacement hard drive is free and I should spend the cash on hookers and booze. I could put the drive in a case but I don't really need another small 1TB drive hanging around collecting dust.
While I have the case open, does anyone have any cheap sources for a replacement optical drive? DVD just keeps spitting the disc out and won't mount.
miley-gen013: