Mac Mini, cover removed

Dead Mac Mini

Today’s One Picture a Day is a simple snapshot of what I spent most of my day with. This mac mini was experiencing start-up hangs and otherwise very poor performance. Booting into the Mountain Lion recovery partition was very slow, too; function was very slow even after the recovery desktop came up. Last week, during troubleshooting for all this, a scan of the hard drive showed the hard drive was in good health. The computer continued to degrade to the point of hanging on boot at the Apple Logo with spinner, not progressing at all  after an hour.  Today, the disk utility showed many errors on the disk; repair hung. It even failed to erase the disk. Time for a change! I dug out a spare drive remaining from an upgrade of another machine. It booted right up without complaint, even though the new disk had been in a macbook pro.

I have experienced this phenomenon before: Disk Utility claiming a healthy drive, despite hangs, long  boots, very poor performance that ultimately turned out to be a bad drive. Food for thought!

This is the first time I have cracked my mac mini. I had been a little intimidated by the putty knife procedure to crack the case of this 2009 model, but it turned out to be quite easy.

Today’s picture is a snapshot with the iPod touch. I applied the Toy Camera preset in Aperture just to spice it up a bit.