• Apple OS X

  Mac won’t boot after power chord became unplugged accidently.

  Posted by Nigel on March 1, 2006 at 2:57 pm

  Mac won’t boot after power chord became unplugged accidently.

  I have a Mac Mini running very latest version of OSX. I was making a recording with QuickTime; when I needed to plug in a USB recording device into the back of the Mac Mini, as I pulled the Mac off my shelf to do this, the power cable came out and the Mac lost power.

  I plugged it back in and powered up the Mac. I get the grey screen with Apple logo and the spinning grey wheel; then it goes to a blue screen (as usual) and I get the “starting OSX…” progress bar. When the progress bar finishes, I’m left with a blue screen only, no dock, no apple icon at top left, nothing across the top, no nothing.

  So far, I’ve booted from the original disc and repaired the permissions as well as the disc, then re-booted, but same old blue screen.

  I have another iMac G5 machine, so is there any way I can at least retrieve the important HD files from the Mac Mini to my G5, before throwing the broken Mac Mini away?

  Can anyone advise please?

  Sammytee replied 20 years, 6 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Jeff Carpenter

  March 1, 2006 at 5:16 pm

  First, check around the Apple.com forums, it’s possible there’s a fix for this that I just don’t know about. Secondly, if you have an Apple store near you then you should just take it there. If this is a simple hardware fix you’d be better off letting them just do it.

  Failing all that, plug a firewire cable into each Mac. Turn on the mini and hold the “T” key on the keyboard.

  That SHOULD load the mini onto the other computer as an external firewire drive. You can just copy whatever you want off of it. (Now, since I don’t know for sure what’s wrong, maybe this won’t work. That’s how it’s supposed to happen, though.)

  After you do that I would simply try erasing the hard drive with the OS X CD and then re-installing everything. There’s a good chance that will clear everything up.
• 

  Nigel

  March 1, 2006 at 7:02 pm

  Okay, sorted. I did the Firewire T transfer of data, then did a clean install, which didn’t overight my existing files, and all is not fine.

  Thanks
• 

  Sammytee

  March 13, 2006 at 12:58 pm

  assuming you are installing OSX by holding down ‘C’ on boot with the OSX CD in the drive……

  then in the setup before you click “upgrade” you should be able to choose and clean install and wipe of hardrive instead of upgrade in the setup or options window with in the setup. if not from what i recall you can also run disk utilty in the apple menu during installation u can wipe ur drive there

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