Hard drive failure - how to boot from replacement?

the hard drive in my Mac Mini has become unbootable - I've gone through all the options suggested in Apple support docs including trying to boot from install disk. I don't get a startup screen to select where to boot from, jus the gray spinning gear. I fear the drive is dead. It was preceeded by strange behavior of permissions. Most of what I read is advice on installing a replacement drive but copying info from the old. How does one create a new bootable drive? I'm thinking of replacing the hard drive with SSD. Thanks Rich

AHT (apple-hardware-test), at least on 10.9-era macs, seems to do *no* tests at all of the hard-driver or SSD. You have to use other testing methods, to run SMART long and short self-tests of SSD and HD as detailed below, and google is your friend.
=== Details ===
For AHT: Power-off. Hold-down "option" and "d" keys, and keep holding them down while you power on. After a minute or two it will boot Apple Hardware Test from internet, at least for 10.9-era hardware. Use a network cable if you can. With known-bad or missing hard-drives, the AHT still says "no problems found".
For example, I have had 3 new macs in 3 weeks that all have hard-drives that always report "read-failure" to SMART tests. The Apple Hardware Test apparently does NOT do any testing of hard-drive(s) at all. Not only did say "No problems found" with the bad-drive(s), if you remove the hard-drive completely it still reports "No problems found"! You may want to run some long SMART tests on hard-drive(s) weekly, even if they are brand new... the 3 that failed on me were different brands from different stores: all reported "read-failure" in around 30 hours. So I conclude that consumer-drives have very poor quality... in effect, the end-user is doing the QA tests by using the drive as apparently little QA goes on at factory. And/or the shipping folks are really throwing those things around hard.
To run SMART tests on a mac, you can "brew install smartmontools" and "brew install gsmartcontrol". Or if you are not a command-line person, you can get a 14-day trial of Drive-DX disk-health tester (looks like ja smartctl-gui-wrapper) from:
http://binaryfruit.com/drivedx They also have a links to a SMART-SAT driver that lets you run smart tests on almost any newer usb-enclosed HD or SSD. Nice
If mac won't boot at all from disk, you can rescue/recover by booting from usb or live-cd such as gparted-live-cd/usb (which boots most intel macs as it has the guid bootability):
http://www.ehow.com/how_8505863_boot-gparted-cd-mac.html
PartedMagic is really nice and boots every intel mac I've tried it on, but is no longer free. Right on desktop is "Disk Health" (which runs gsmartcontrol). Also has ddrescue, testdisk, photorec, etc. Sees HFS+ just fine.

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Hi there,
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Copying content from your iPod to your computer - The Definitive Guide.

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Apple PowerMac4,1 4.1.9f1 BootRom built on 09/14/01 at 13.18.04
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New hard drive...wont boot from cd

hello,
i just installed a new hard drive. when i powered on and tried to eject the cd bay, it would not. i opened it via paper clip, installed cd and restarted holding "c" but it would not boot from cd. power button is pulsing and fans accelerated, so i powered off. 2 x 1 gig of ram in top two slots. cd drive light does not flash when holding c button.
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Have you done a PRAM reset, CMDOption+pr...
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=2238
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reset-nvram (press Enter)
set-defaults (press Enter)
reset-all (press Enter)
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http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1436
Earlier G3, G4, G5 models...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1939

Hard Drive not recognized when booting from XP CD on docking station

The hard drive on my X60 failed to the point where I couldn't recover and reinstall the image. I have backups of all my data and a docking station so I didn't sweat it. Bought a new drive and installed it and this is when the trouble began.
I created an XP CD with SP2 slipstreamed in to make sure I have the latest drivers. I boot from XP CD and everything works until I try to install Windows. According to the installation CD there is no drive installed!
I reinstalled the drive to make sure and this time I booted off of Ubuntu Linux which installed flawlessly. That leads me to believe that there is a driver problem with Windows.
I need help! I would like to install Windows on the machine but nothing I've tried works.

edgardo wrote:
According to the installation CD there is no drive installed!
Standard Microsoft XP SP2 does not come with any SATA device drivers.
You have two options:
Go into the T60 BIOS and switch the SATA controller mode away from AHCI to "IDE" mode (or pehaps its "legacy" or "compatibility" mode - I forget what specific term is used in a ThinkPad BIOS).
Find the SATA device driver for XP (it's probably in the Intel Chipset driver download) on the Lenovo X60 support web site, download it and install it using the additional driver installation option which is offered right at the start of an XP install.
If you chose option 1, remember to switch the SATA controller back to AHCI mode in the BIOS after you have installed the SATA device driver.
Cheers,
Bill
Message Edited by billbolton on 03-09-2008 02:11 PM
I don't work for Lenovo

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Earlier this week, I dropped my computer.
It was probably a 3 foot fall.
Computer froze, so I restarted and got the flashing folder with question mark.
Started in internet recovery, and disk utility confirmed that I had killed my hard drive.
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Hard drive failure - how to boot from replacement?

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