Normally, doing this would present a special screen showing all accessible bootable volumes.

Startup Manager, a useful interface for choosing your boot volume during startup.) Not because the external hard drive would have worked-it wouldn’t have-but because to boot from it, I would have had to use OS X’s This would have saved me a lot of time and frustration. (As someone who’s written volumes on Mac troubleshooting, I then realized, with much embarrassment, that there was one basic step I hadn’t attemped earlier: I hadn’t tried to boot the mini from a different hard drive. So I pulled out my trusty putty knife and took the mini apart.Įverything was connected properly, so I removed the mini’s hard drive and connected it to my MacBook-it mounted properly, Disk Utility and DiskWarrior both gave it a clean bill of health, and it showed up as a bootable volume. Taken apart this Mac mini many times, I thought there might be a cable loose inside.

The mini remained stuck at the question-mark-folder screen. I even tried different keyboards, mice, and power supplies. Puzzled, I disconnected everything from the Mac mini but the power, display, and keyboard cables to be sure a bad peripheral wasn’t the cause of the problem. Heck, I even tried resetting the parameter RAM (“zapping the PRAM”) by

I tried booting the Mac mini into FireWire target disk mode (by holding down the T key) so I could connect the mini as a hard drive to my Mac Pro, but target disk mode wouldn’t work. (Holding down D similarly didn’t launch the OS X disc’s Diagnostic Mode.) I tried holding down Command-S to enter single-user mode, hoping to run the fsck command to test and repair the drive. I tried booting from both the Mac OS X DVD and a DiskWarrior CD to check the hard drive for directory corruption, but holding down the C key at startup wouldn’t force the mini to boot from the optical drive. I tried starting up in Safe Boot mode by holding down Shift at startup, but the mini acted as if Safe Boot didn’t exist. I force-restarted a couple times just to make sure this wasn’t a one-time glitch.

Force a mac dvd drive