Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Can't boot 2011 Mac Mini to cd-rom for SSD firmware update

R

Robbadore64

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 7, 2008
242
0
Jacksonville, Florida
First, my apologies if this has been posted before - I could not find anything on MR (and I've tried a lot of what I've seen on related threads).

I bought an entry level 2011 mac mini a few weeks and ago and have since:
1) Upgraded to 8 gig of Crucial RAM - everything worked fine
2) Bought and external USB Samsung cd-rom drive for those rare occasions I need it - seems to work fine
3) Most recently I replaced the HD with a Crucial M4 256 SSD
4) Reset PRAM - worked fine

This is my first SSD and I really love it most of the time. The problem is that occasionally it freezes up within various apps and I just get that rainbow wheel for about 30 seconds. During this I can't switch focus to other applications or anything - just have to wait it out. I've read other posts on the Crucial site with people having the same issue where they simply said (I upgraded the firmware which worked fine, then the problem went away).

So I see I'm running firmware ver 1 for the SSD and there is a ver 2 out there. I downloaded the ISO and burned it to disk but I cannot get the mini to boot from it.

I've tried resetting the PRAM but it only works when the CD-rom drive is disconnected. I've tried holding option at boot, tried holding 'c' at boot,etc and nothing makes it go into a cd-rom boot. Am I missing something? I've tried burning a few disks and they all appear successful but none have booted. This is my first non iMac so I'm new to having to use externals. Unfortunally because this is Lion, I have no bootable disks to "test" with.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!! I love the performance of the drive but this is driving me crazy.
 
have you tried restoring the iso to a usb flash drive and booting from it? assuming the iso is bootable, maybe the mini doesn't recognize the samsung drive as bootable.
 
indg said:
have you tried restoring the iso to a usb flash drive and booting from it? assuming the iso is bootable, maybe the mini doesn't recognize the samsung drive as bootable.
Click to expand...

Kind of. When I tried to "burn" to the flash drive through Disk Utility it gave me the option to select either the cd-rom or the flash drive but the 'burn' option was grayed out when I selected it (so I just copied the contents to the flash drive, and fail when trying to boot from it). Thanks though!

What adds insult to injury is that when I do try to boot to the cd-rom the disk spins and the light flickers etc so I get the impression its trying..... I'm tempted to try making the boot disk from my work assigned Dell laptop - couldn't hurt I guess.
 
indg said:
maybe the iso doesn't have a boot partition the mac recognizes? have you tried a disc with the samsung drive that you know will boot or appear as a boot drive when you hold down option during bootup? have other mac users successfully done what you're trying to do?

assume you read through all this:
http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-S...02-Firmware-Update-feedback-Thread/td-p/52030
Click to expand...

I figured out part of the problem. The cd-rom drive has two usb ports that plug into the mac of the mini (to make sure it ha enough power). When I disconnect one of them it is able to see the device when I do the alt option upon boot. So yay!

Now the problem is that the cd it recognizes says Windows, so thats not cool. This is the only image provided by Crucial for this drive and I have read where mac users have updated their firmware for this drive so the search continues...
 
Seeing WINDOWS is good as that means it is a bootable Windows image. That is what you need to select.
 
saulinpa said:
Seeing WINDOWS is good as that means it is a bootable Windows image. That is what you need to select.
Click to expand...

I tried that and the screen just went black. I waited a couple of minutes and nothing ever happened so rebooted.

I reviewed parts of the link above this morning but now I'm going through every post......
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back