Hi all,
my boss was going to throw away an old Mac mini from late 2006, which didn't power up "because of the power supply". So I took it instead and have enjoyed a fun Saturday
Thanks to this post: 2006 Mac mini Possible fix for no power to logic board (https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2006-mac-mini-possible-fix-for-no-power-to-logic-board.1513809/)
I found two bad capacitors on the logic board and, after removing them, voilà! the Mac mini was powered again.
Now the problem is that the system powers up but it doesn't actually boot up. It does absolutely nothing: no chime, no speaker beeps, no LED flashes. It just powers up, the HDD starts spinning, and the white LED lights up and stays there.
I have already removed all hardware: HDD, RAM, DVD. Nothing changes: the LED is ON and it doesn't flash twice to signal that the RAM is missing. According to the Power On Self-Test Beep Definition (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT1547) from Apple, the Mac mini should beep once and its LED should flash twice when no RAM is installed. However, this doesn't happen.
The last thing that I could remove was the processor: I happened to have an Intel Pentium M 745 processor, which uses the same Socket 479 as the Mac mini, so I put it instead of the default one. The result is that the LED doesn't even light up! ... Well, I kind of expected that it would not work.
Next thing I tried was just powering the Mac mini without any processor installed. It just powers up and the white LED stays there... exactly the same as when the original processor is installed!
I'm now starting to get a bit tired of trying to revive this Mac, however after all the great information given in the first post I mentioned, I couldn't throw in the towel without first asking you guys: what other things should I try to revive this guy?
Thank you!
---- EDIT
I just thought that the RAM detection, and the beeping/flashing sequence, is a routine typically performed by the BIOS, right? Or in the case of Intel based Mac minis, the EFI. Could it be possible that this EFI got corrupted by some reason, and because of this no hardware initialization is being performed?
my boss was going to throw away an old Mac mini from late 2006, which didn't power up "because of the power supply". So I took it instead and have enjoyed a fun Saturday
Thanks to this post: 2006 Mac mini Possible fix for no power to logic board (https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2006-mac-mini-possible-fix-for-no-power-to-logic-board.1513809/)
I found two bad capacitors on the logic board and, after removing them, voilà! the Mac mini was powered again.
Now the problem is that the system powers up but it doesn't actually boot up. It does absolutely nothing: no chime, no speaker beeps, no LED flashes. It just powers up, the HDD starts spinning, and the white LED lights up and stays there.
I have already removed all hardware: HDD, RAM, DVD. Nothing changes: the LED is ON and it doesn't flash twice to signal that the RAM is missing. According to the Power On Self-Test Beep Definition (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT1547) from Apple, the Mac mini should beep once and its LED should flash twice when no RAM is installed. However, this doesn't happen.
The last thing that I could remove was the processor: I happened to have an Intel Pentium M 745 processor, which uses the same Socket 479 as the Mac mini, so I put it instead of the default one. The result is that the LED doesn't even light up! ... Well, I kind of expected that it would not work.
Next thing I tried was just powering the Mac mini without any processor installed. It just powers up and the white LED stays there... exactly the same as when the original processor is installed!
I'm now starting to get a bit tired of trying to revive this Mac, however after all the great information given in the first post I mentioned, I couldn't throw in the towel without first asking you guys: what other things should I try to revive this guy?
Thank you!
---- EDIT
I just thought that the RAM detection, and the beeping/flashing sequence, is a routine typically performed by the BIOS, right? Or in the case of Intel based Mac minis, the EFI. Could it be possible that this EFI got corrupted by some reason, and because of this no hardware initialization is being performed?
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