Emily's Mac Mini recently developed a fault which appeared to be RAM related. This evening I took the mini apart and replaced the RAM - not the easiest operation - putty knives and nerves of steel required to open the thing :-)

 

I ran the extensive h/w test - all ok, so good news there. Just need to stick with 512MB RAM for the time being.

 

Installed OS X - fine, so that kind of proved that the problem had been with the 1GB RAM...

 

Booted the cube (which Emily has been using as a replacement machine in the interim) to target mode to "copy data from old mac" during first OS X boot. No go :-(

 

First the mini locked up - spinning ball. Then restarted both - it saw the cube's target drive, but then reported no copy of OS X on it.... Slightly alarming! Rebooted the cube - all ok, thankfully.... (I would have been in the doghouse if I had lost the data)

 

So... Now I will have to continue building the mini from install disks and then copy data from cube onto lacie drive via firewire and then copy from there onto mini. I just hope that works.... A job for tomorrow evening. Tiresome fact is that I have now had to put the cube back in situ, connect it all up again etc. Such a pain!! (I had moved it into the lounge to facilitate firewire connection, which I thought was a sensible idea.)

 

Too much data to copy over wifi as the cube is only sloooow 802.11b over USB1.1... Let's hope that firewire works ok with the lacie. Will be interesting to see if it works with the cube, but not the mini, or with both. If there is a firewire problem with the mini, then I suspect there is a problem with the logic board, although that passed the diagnostic that I ran from the OS X install disks.

 

Time for bed...