As I was ranting about yesterday, my desktop Mac Mini failed and the only assistance that Apple was willing to offer was a burial. Maybe there would’ve been flowers and a choir, but from their perspective, it was dead and they didn’t want anything to do with it.
After the mandated and necessary 2.3 minutes spent in grief and anger (and writing a lengthy rant about it), I started to more seriously research if there was, indeed, any way to actually fix the damn thing. Turns out, there’s actually a bunch of videos and such about replacing the hard drive in an old Mac Mini. [No, I’m not going to link them here. You can search … and this way, you can’t complain when you break your computer. So there!]
The bottom line seemed to be that the drive itself is a fairly standard 2.5-inch SATA hard drive. The tricky part is replacing it. Once it’s actually replaced, there’s apparently a trick, during the boot process, that can be used on Macs (Cmd+R) that gets you into “MacOS Recovery Mode”, which lets you access a Time Machine ™ backup to restore it and a couple of other utilities.
So – Step 1: Replace hard drive; Step 2: Recovery Mode; Step 3: Working Computer!
Except … there’s a few tricky and fiddly bits during taking the computer apart and putting it back together. [If you’ve ever built anything from IKEA … imagine needing to put everything back into the original flat-pack packaging … yeah, that’s what putting a Mac Mini back together is like, from what I saw.]
I hunted around and realized there was one place that might do that sort of drive replacement. [I won’t name them, but the initials of the company are “B.B.”] I tried calling them and after talking with the usual script-reading idiot at the other end of the line and then getting shuffled off to a “Please wait. Your call is important to us, and someone will talk to you before the heat-death of the universe.” queue, I decided it would be easier to just head over there (the store is about 15 minutes away) and talk to a real, live human being.
There, I was informed that, nope, since they do have a contract arrangement with Apple, they’re not allowed to open up any Apple products whose names don’t start with “iP-” (followed by “-hone” or “-ad”). However, the guy there was able to suggest another nearby place that might be able to help.
Short trip and a quick conversation with a tech later and … YES!!! They can do drive replacements on a Mac Mini and have done so before. Ideally, could I show up with the broken computer and a replacement drive and they can do the install for me.
Since the hard drive was a “moving part”, and I’m a “fan” (didja see what I did there?) of fewer moving parts – since moving parts have a greater tendency to break – I decided I wanted to upgrade to an SSD. And, if I’m doing that, I might as well go for bigger (the old drive was a 500 GB) at the same time.
The one word of caution from the tech was that I would, hopefully, get a drive that was already formatted for a Mac since that would be easier to use. He noted that he didn’t have a Mac in the repair area, so formatting it might be a bit of a pain.
Ok – I can take a hint, and I even had a possible solution if I couldn’t get the right drive. Back to B.B. and I found / purchased a 1TB SSD. It was, of course, not formatted for Macs. I returned to the tech by way of home first (to grab my Macbook Air) and handed over the lot. I said since the drive wasn’t formatted as needed, I’d brought my own laptop to reformat the SSD, so long as he could provide a SATA-to-USB adapter.
Minutes later, the drive was reformatted and everything handed over. The expectation is that they’ll be contacting me tomorrow (Monday) to say I should come pick it up because it’s already fixed and working.
So, thankfully, rather than needing to spend several hundreds of dollars on a new computer, the total cost of this repair / upgrade (aside from a bunch of time spent on this) is going to be about $180-plus-tax. That’s $80 for the SSD, and $100 for the repair.
I’m ok with this…
