Replaced Hard Drive Mac Mini 2011

[yasirfaheem]

Hello,
I replaced the hard drive in the my mac mini 2011. It still has snow leopard on it. I do not have the mac book pro that the hard drive came out of any more. When i turn on my mac mini with the new hard drive in it. It will not auto start lion internet recovery so the os can be downloaded. When i turn on the computer i hear the apple chime and then i see a white screen on the monitor and nothing else happens. Did i mess up the computer replacing the hard drive. Any help will be very help to me. Lion is a great os but apple sucks for not give physical media to reinstall the os.

 

[MJL]

Hello,
I replaced the hard drive in the my mac mini 2011. It still has snow leopard on it. I do not have the mac book pro that the hard drive came out of any more. When i turn on my mac mini with the new hard drive in it. It will not auto start lion internet recovery so the os can be downloaded. When i turn on the computer i hear the apple chime and then i see a white screen on the monitor and nothing else happens. Did i mess up the computer replacing the hard drive. Any help will be very help to me. Lion is a great os but apple sucks for not give physical media to reinstall the os.

I have the older 2010 mac mini. If you still have the old hdd then you can plug that onto an adapter / enclosure and boot from that when holding down the option key.

From that onwards you can start recovering, I think (am pretty sure) that I have seen some message about that you can get a recovery USB key / image that you can use in case the HDD has been replaced.

Basically what I am saying is not to panic and no need to put the old hdd back in to the 2011 mini.

If you have another computer (obviously you must have since you are posting) and a couple of external hdd lying around then you can use something else like CopyCatX to clone the disk (you need two externals: one to boot from and then to copy the second external onto the internal. The internal cannot be smaller than the drive that you are using as source)

My best suggestion would be to get on net and research this bootable image thingy. I do not know for certain (very vaguely something sticks in my mind) but there was also something about holding down a ??? T (not sure) while booting and then the machine would go out on the web and find itself all the stuff.

 

[clystron]

Have you tried cmd+R to start recovery?

I replaced the original HDD with an SSD in my 2011 mini yesterday and out of curiousity I wanted to test the recovery. It did not start automatically, I had to trigger it by pressing cmd+R on startup.

 

[yasirfaheem]

Have you tried cmd+R to start recovery?

I replaced the original HDD with an SSD in my 2011 mini yesterday and out of curiousity I wanted to test the recovery. It did not start automatically, I had to trigger it by pressing cmd+R on startup.

cmd +r seems to work but how does it know my wireless network password or does it just use the ethernet port? Since i do not have a recovery partition on the hard drive it is doing a internet recovery. Will i get the local recovery partition back when it is done with the internet reinstall?

 

[jmcgeejr]

cmd +r seems to work but how does it know my wireless network password or does it just use the ethernet port? Since i do not have a recovery partition on the hard drive it is doing a internet recovery. Will i get the local recovery partition back when it is done with the internet reinstall?

When you try to join the wifi it will ask you for the password, or it will use Ethernet which I recommend for the recovery and it will wipe the drive and install everything from scratch for you. This is the best way to go in my opinion.

 

[yasirfaheem]

cmd+r worked for me but the installer does not see the hard drive. I hope i did not break something.

 

[clystron]

cmd+r worked for me but the installer does not see the hard drive. I hope i did not break something.

Do you see it in Disk Utility?
The installer claimed to not be connected to the internet (DNS trouble) so I just cloned the original HDD (via USB) to the SSD but I could not set it as startup disk because the list there was totally empty. I ended up booting from the USB-Drive and setting the SSD as startup disk from there.

If you dont see the drive in disk-utility you should recheck your hardware.