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2009 mac mini won’t boot

a few months ago I started up my mac mini again and it has been having problems ever since. Firstly it show that it had kernel issues but I “fixed” that by restarting it. However, a few weeks ago it started to have problems when booting up. I would turn it on and when the gray screen with the Apple logo and the loading bar appeared it would stay there forever. But again, I would turn it off and back on and it booted fine. Now it stays on that screen forever and when it reaches the end it shuts down.

this is all i have done: safe mode, first aid, /sbin/fsck -fy in single user mode. Nothing worked.

Yesterday I tried reinstalling OS but when i have to choose the hard drive Macintosh HD doesn’t appear and Recovery HD is locked.

Any information is greatly appreciated.

Posted on May 6, 2020 7:41 AM

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7 replies

May 7, 2020 9:15 AM in response to _TTRZ

Yes if the drive is healthy, then selecting the physical drive to erase should bypass a drive protected by Filevault.


If you don't see the physical drive then click on "View" within Disk Utility and select "Show All Devices" so that the physical drive appears in the left pane of Disk Utility. This is required with more recent versions of macOS (I forget when Apple made this change, but it was a terrible decision to hide the drive).

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208496

May 6, 2020 7:03 PM in response to _TTRZ

If Filevault is enabled, then perhaps you first need to launch Disk Utility while in Recovery Mode to try to mount/unlock the "Macintosh HD". Then click "Reinstall macOS" to see if "Macintosh HD" shows up as an option for the destination.


Like @mdp1101 I suspect you may have a failing hard drive.

2009 mac mini won’t boot

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