Mac Mini (Late 2014 i7)

[kje54]

Bought a renewed Mac Mini, installed OpenCore on it but determined that Sequoia ran way too slowly on it. Kept trying to mount OpenCore but for some reason Finder wouldn't see it. Therefore I could not mount it to delete OpenCore. Had the bright idea of loading Linux Fedora to basically kill OpenCore so I could reinstall at least Big Sur......... It did the job all to well, tried for a week to get macOS loaded back on it which also killed Fedora. Nothing worked and I mean nothing. The SSD is locked and I cannot erase it to load any new system on it and it will not see any flash drive.
Unless someone knows of something that is not covered under any of the help subjects/how tos I think I'll have to replace the SSD drive. I hope that will work.

 

[Bigwaff]

Have you tried Internet Recovery? Plug in ethernet cable and hold Option-Command-R on start up.

Use macOS Recovery on an Intel-based Mac

Learn how to use macOS Recovery on an Intel-based Mac.

support.apple.com

 

[kje54]

Have you tried Internet Recovery? Plug in ethernet cable and hold Option-Command-R on start up.

Use macOS Recovery on an Intel-based Mac

Learn how to use macOS Recovery on an Intel-based Mac.

support.apple.com

I haven't tried it with an ethernet cable only via wifi. Will do that and see what happens.
No luck, "disk is locked".

 

[Bigwaff]

No luck, "disk is locked".

In Disk Utility while booted into Internet Recovery?

 

[kje54]

In Disk Utility while booted into Internet Recovery?

Yes, tried about 20 times in total from the very start trying to find ways to unlock the drive. It doesn't give me any other drive or any other option. I can get into disk utility but the drive is "being used" so I can't reset/erase it.
So I'm thinking that drive is basically gone, a waste of any more time unless I can take it out and somehow reset it hooked up to another Mac. However I already have unused SSDs I can replace it with so that's not a big deal. The only question at this point is do I need to install anything on the new drive prior to trying to install macOS or are the startup files stored on the mobo?

 

[kje54]

I switched out the 258GB SSD for a 1TB SSD, found a Monterey thumb drive I had and now it's up and running. Being a late 2014 mini, Monterey is the most recent version supported. That is unless I install OpenCore, maybe I will and maybe I won't. I do know that Sonoma installed via OpenCore is sluggish on this system so if I do use OpenCore the latest I'll go is Ventura.
I'll probably use it as a Plex media server.

 

[FirDerrig33]

I switched out the 258GB SSD for a 1TB SSD, found a Monterey thumb drive I had and now it's up and running. Being a late 2014 mini, Monterey is the most recent version supported. That is unless I install OpenCore, maybe I will and maybe I won't. I do know that Sonoma installed via OpenCore is sluggish on this system so if I do use OpenCore the latest I'll go is Ventura.
I'll probably use it as a Plex media server.

How much RAM do you have in that system? if it's 8GB then I think it will be sluggish for a bit. I switched from a Mac Pro to my 2014 Mini i5 with 8GB and have been trying different things to decrease memory usage.

 

[StoneJack]

Monterey is perfectly fine for such older computer.

 

[kje54]

How much RAM do you have in that system? if it's 8GB then I think it will be sluggish for a bit. I switched from a Mac Pro to my 2014 Mini i5 with 8GB and have been trying different things to decrease memory usage.

It has 16GB.

 

[dictoresno]

im running OCLP on my late 2014 in my garage with Sequoia 15.1 beta and its running just fine. I also have a blade NVMe and a backup SSD drive running on it. maybe that's where you're seeing your issues. trying to run newer software on slower spinning hard drives is probably where you're gonna see terrible performance.

 

[kje54]

im running OCLP on my late 2014 in my garage with Sequoia 15.1 beta and its running just fine. I also have a blade NVMe and a backup SSD drive running on it. maybe that's where you're seeing your issues. trying to run newer software on slower spinning hard drives is probably where you're gonna see terrible performance.

The drive was an SSD and it ran fine, it was just slow, for me that is. I like my computers to preform a function almost before I think of it........ My M1 Mac Mini is almost twice as fast as the 2014 i9 when it had OCLP Sonoma on it.