You ever have one of those night where you just have to get something done before you can go to sleep? That’s how last night was for me, thanks to the death of a hard drive in one of my 2 Mac mini systems. The unit in question is an old Core 2 Duo system from 2007 or so running Mac OS X 10.7.5, Lion. In the year or so I’ve owned it I’ve used it for precisely bugger all, as a slightly older Core Duo Mac mini has filled my low-budget home file server role nicely. These are machines I’ve not written about yet, and I’d rather not spoil their stories here, but suffice it to say in 2018 and 2019 when I was buying quite a few Macintosh systems I went a bit Mac mini “server” crazy. Hey, I like old computers, what can I say?
These machines had their hard drives replaced with spare 500 GB laptop drives I salvaged from work. I say salvaged because these drives were originally in “dead” PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles. In some cases they can be restored to mostly working shape in a process that takes quite a long time and isn’t something we’d actually bother with at the shop; it’s better to just replace the drive for the customer if (or in the case of PS4 systems, when it dies) and the candidates for restoration I take home. If they can be salvaged, awesome, I’ll use them in a project. If not, oh well, I scrap it and move on with life.
Well, turns out I took a bit too much risk with one of those drives — namely the one in the Core 2 Duo Mac mini, referred to as “Lion” since it’s the only machine I own which runs Mac OS Lion — that being the maximum supported OS on the machine. I bought it originally intending to replace the Core Duo Mac mini but I decided the older machine was still fine for what I wanted, and that the Lion machine would be useful to me in other ways — what ways I haven’t the foggiest but hey, it’s a unique slice of time in Apple history and a low power enough machine for whatever. That’s just it — whatever. I didn’t have a goal for the machine, and as such it just sat on the server shelf unused in my office — it was basically a stand for the other Mac mini to rest on! So, while the machine had a good install of Lion and some software, it was sitting idle for easily months — I would sometimes bring it into my room and fire it up in the hopes of finding a use for it, but no, that wouldn’t happen and it wound up just spending more time sitting in my room in a box filled with other random junk.
Move to last night. Since I’ve got my “office” setup rebuilt in the living room I figured it’d be nice to get that Mac mini set up for something. Naturally, since I hadn’t used the system in months it would be a good idea to fire up the machine and see what was up on it — refresh myself with a computer I hadn’t tried to use since easily October. Well, I went through the usual process of plugging up power and firing it up. I have the machine set up to be accessible remotely so I fired up VNC on my Windows machine and went to log in.
Nothing.
Okay, this has happened before. No big, sometimes the local domain name gets messed up or maybe the wireless connection didn’t engage, let me connect the network cable then check the router device table. I did that, logged into the router and saw the status of “Lion” as “Inactive.”
Well damn, that’s not good. I’ve got no network. Well, nothing I can do now, let’s go on and connect a keyboard, mouse and display. It can’t be that bad, right? Well, I did just that, and saw nothing but white on the display. The system was just sitting there. I repeatedly powered down and rebooted, getting the chime and hearing things fire up, but no Apple logo.
Okay, how about Target Disk Mode? Booting while holding down the “T” key, in very simple form, turns a Macintosh like this into a very fancy Firewire hard drive — a “target disk” to work on. I did just that, saw the Firewire logo on screen and connected my PowerBook G4 to the machine via a Firewire cable. No dice. The optical drive was working, but not the hard drive. It, apparently, was dead, meaning the machine was fucked.
Wonderful. This means I’d have to open it up, which isn’t the most easy process, unscrew a bunch of stuff, replace the hard drive, then reinstall the operating system. That’s just how I wanted to spend my night! /sarcasm. So, I began that process. This all took a while, however, and I was hell bent on finishing this all up before I went to bed. Due to the Mac OS Lion disc images being stored on a computer which I wasn’t about to try to use in the middle of the night, I couldn’t go ahead with a new Lion install, but I wanted something on there, so I went to install Snow Leopard. Turns out my disc that came with this very Mac mini is an upgrade disc, and I needed Leopard installed. That’s good because I recently bought a copy of Leopard from a friend at work — convenient! That meant, however, I had to sit through that entire install, just to go ahead and do the Snow Leopard install. For those keeping track via numbers, this means I had to install Mac OS X 10.5, then 10.6, before I could go ahead and do 10.7 this morning.
By 5:30 in the morning Snow Leopard had been installed, and I felt I had a “safe” situation with the machine — the replacement hard drive was working and in the event I ran into issues getting Lion back on the system (it’s always a bit of a hack job the way I do it) the machine was at least as usable as the other Mac mini. Moreover, though, my compulsion to “fix” the issue was satiated and I could finally go to sleep, knowing I had the “fun” part (the Lion install) ahead of me, with the more annoying work (actually replacing the drive) behind me. I actually want to cover that on its own later, as I learned something kind of interesting during it.
In the end, though, thinking about this, it’s just one of those things that happens sometimes. I’d like to replace the HDD in this system with an SSD of some capacity — even 128 gigs would be fine — and do similar with the other Mac mini (only larger capacity there) but this is, as I always say, another story — I’ve not even written about these machines properly in their own right so its best to end things here.
If there is one thing to take away from this, it’s that I really care about these old machines for reasons not even I understand. That, or maybe one should never use previously abused PlayStation 4 hard drives inside a Mac mini unless you want to be back inside the machine within a year.
More to come, as always.
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