I left my 2009 mini exporting a video in the morning, and when I came back to it in the evening, it was stuck on the blue shutdown screen - which was weird because I leave it running 24/7 and it had no obvious reason to shut down. It may have been sitting like that for hours, but I left it for about 15 minutes longer and it still hadn't completed shutdown, so I did a hard reboot.
I got the startup chime and the grey screen, but no Apple logo. I left it for about 5 minutes and eventually I got the question mark graphic, so I rebooted again using my SL install disc, went into Disk Utility and tried Repair Disk. It came back with an error about B-tree nodes and said that it couldn't complete verification, and then said that it was recreating boot partitions (or words to that effect) and got stuck for another 15 minutes, after which I figured that it was in trouble and did another hard reboot.
Now it won't boot from the CD any more. It *will* let me boot it into Target Disk mode, so I hooked it up to my MBP to see if I could get any joy repairing the disk with the MBP's Disk Utility. Unfortunately, the mini's HD won't mount on the MBP's desktop, but the MBP's Disk Utility does see the mini's HD - in fact, it sees multiple instances of it (it got up to about six instances of the same 320Gb drive), but if I try and erase it it gives me a POSIX error.
I'm guessing this is probably a dead HD, in fact I'm *hoping* that this is a dead HD and nothing more expensive. I'll be off to buy a putty knife later today, but does anyone have any insight?
I got the startup chime and the grey screen, but no Apple logo. I left it for about 5 minutes and eventually I got the question mark graphic, so I rebooted again using my SL install disc, went into Disk Utility and tried Repair Disk. It came back with an error about B-tree nodes and said that it couldn't complete verification, and then said that it was recreating boot partitions (or words to that effect) and got stuck for another 15 minutes, after which I figured that it was in trouble and did another hard reboot.
Now it won't boot from the CD any more. It *will* let me boot it into Target Disk mode, so I hooked it up to my MBP to see if I could get any joy repairing the disk with the MBP's Disk Utility. Unfortunately, the mini's HD won't mount on the MBP's desktop, but the MBP's Disk Utility does see the mini's HD - in fact, it sees multiple instances of it (it got up to about six instances of the same 320Gb drive), but if I try and erase it it gives me a POSIX error.
I'm guessing this is probably a dead HD, in fact I'm *hoping* that this is a dead HD and nothing more expensive. I'll be off to buy a putty knife later today, but does anyone have any insight?