Booting a Mac mini A1283.

Dec 15, 2020 4 Replies

Hi,



Can anyone tell me whether an A1283 can boot with the lid off?



I've had the machine apart to check the lithium cell and HDD. The cell has 3 V and gparted in Debian 10 finds an HFS file system on the drive.



If possible I want to verify bootability before putting the lid on. Wondering whether the tab at the back of the lid needs to touch the contact in the hole allow booting.



Thx, ... P.



Hmm, I thought I had an a-1283 but in getting out my high powered magnifying lenses I see it's an a-1103.

Hmm???

Ahhh... another of my Mac Mini's says it's an a-1283.

I didn't realize until today they were different models.

I've certainly used them with the tops off, but can't exacly swear that it was the a-1283.

_____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key dannyb@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]

OK. With the tab at the bottom of the well shorted to the perimeter shield it still won't boot. Resetting the NVRAM doesn't help. I'll try re-seating the CPU. At present I have no further ideas.

Thanks, ... P.

If it's one of those mini's that use the external power brick, it's probably the brick.

I had a couple of those mini's, one didn't boot/turn on, tried the other brick, came up fine. Then a month or two later, dead again. I don't think those were made for more than 10 years of use. No ventilation.

I'm pretty sure the shield has nothing to do with the machine booting.

-bruce snipped-for-privacy@ripco.com

Wouldn't hurt to re-seat the RAM module. My A1103 quit booting with what looked like a disk failure. After much unsucessful experimentation I noticed the DIMM was ever-so-slightly crooked.

Re-seated the RAM module and the machine booted flawlessly, and still does. I'll admit I don't remember if the case was on or off, but very likely off.

I know, correlation isn't causation, but if you're in there already....

hth,

bob prohaska

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