Chosen Solution
Hello community. I have a mac mini 2012 i7 2.3Gh/z and a 2010. I succeeded in fitting the 2012 motherboard in the 2010 chassis with an original macbook pro optical disk drive in it without modifying the motherboard. Sadly the optical disk drive does not want to take discs. It doesn’t swallow the disks at all. The optical drive doesn’t makes sound on startup. In System Information I do see the optical drive appearing in SATA and in disk burn. When I put in the 2010 motherboard again the drive is fully function. As I’ve been reading some old forums for this swap. I’ve found out that the 2012 model needed a modified SATA cable which has pin 4 removed on the data part of the cable. I also have tried a SMC reset and an older operating system (high sierra). I also tried installing mountain lion the original os it came with. But it all didn’t work sadly.The drive does seem to eject discs when I put “drutil tray eject” in terminal.I was wondering if someone knows how this problem could be solved. Thanks in advance.
So I’ve figured it out! Apparently I removed the wrong number 4 pin. I removed it from the power lines instead of the data lines. It works perfectly now without the Manufacturing Diagnostic pin (and a missing ground pin). I’m going to order a new cable though where I will only remove the Manufacturing Diagnostic pin just to be safe. I’ve now have managed to put in the Mac mini 2012 2.3Gh/z i7 motherboard into a Mac mini 2010 case without modifying the motherboard. I will hopefully add a blu-ray drive in the future.
I don’t know much about this machine (heck, I’m just taking a guess here) but it seems like maybe it’s not fitting into the case right or is not compatible with the newer motherboard. It could also be that this machine just won’t work with an internal disk drive, as the machine is not designed to.
