Chosen Solution

After a reboot yesterday my 2010 Mac Mini A1347 no longer boots, after power on I get the Apple logo then a kernel panic. Things I’ve tried that didn’t work.

  1. Disconnected everything, left then powered on.
  2. Reseated RAM (1 stick)
  3. Swapped RAM slots
  4. Connected to another Mac via Target mode and formatted the disk with a bootable image of Snow Leopard. Booted holding Option, selected disk image. Still panics.
  5. Swapped hard disk with known working disk, then did step 4. Still panics. I can’t boot from optical because the optical drive won’t accept media. I don’t have different memory to try, so I can’t eliminate that.. At this point I’m at a loss. Anything else I can try?

I’m a little confused about step#4. Have you tried putting the other machine in target mode, and then booting the mini from the other machine’s hard drive (by powering on in option mode, assuming it lets you get to option mode)? Using this method you could also put bootable media in the other machine’s optical drive, and boot the mini from it. I would be curious if installing Snow Leopard from the DVD would work, just in case your image is corrupted, etc. If you are able to boot the machine from OS media or the remote hard drive, I’d definitely check to see how much RAM it’s seeing. A leading cause of kernel panics is the machine not having enough RAM for the OS. Snow Leopard requires a gig of RAM for an OS install to proceed, although it will generally boot OK with as little as 512MB. That’s a fairly new mini, so is it under warranty?

I wasn’t aware I could boot of another mac disk via target mode! Great tip. I was able to boot successfully of another mac disk over target mode, thereby eliminating the mini’s hardware. In the end the issue was that I was trying to install 10.6 when I needed to install 10.6.3. For whatever reason, you can’t boot and install 10.6 on a 2010 mini, I confirmed this with Apple. Anyway, installed 10.6.3 and everything is fine.