Mini mac and a possible broken charger unit

Question

In a discussion with a mate he asked if I ever had problems with charger units on my mac.
He uses a mini mac in connection to an external harddrive. That external harddrive currently died during runtime.
The mini mac itself was running fine till then - but it keeps shutting itself down after 5 minutes. No chance on reboot to run it again.
Only after removing the charger from the house power socket it is rebootable.
I never had any issues with the apple chargers yet myself. Might be that the step into virtual nirvana of the external harddrive damaged the charger, though I am not aware if the charger have a return line / return duct.
Does anyone here has experience with such kind of trouble shooting?
Cheers in advace

Answer 1

Several thoughts come to mind, the first of which being that the mini doesn't have a 'charger' - it has an external power brick - thus it can't run unless it is plugged in.
That aside, to troubleshoot this problem it would really be better to have the owner/user of this system post here rather than you, simply because that would give us a first hand description of the problem and allow us to ask questions about the system and its behaviour. Doing it this way can make trying to work out what's going on far more difficult.
For example, what kind of Mac mini is this; how old is it; what is it used for; what software is installed on it; are the shutdowns accompanied by any fan activity; does the system simply shut down or are there any error messages or other dialog boxes on the display; what happens when an attempt is made to reboot it after a shutdown; how much time is needed after shutting down before it starts up again......?
My first reaction to the symptoms as briefly described is that the system is suffering from an overheating problem since the mini is designed to go into protective shutdown if it gets too hot. If that were the case then it would run a lot longer when started from cold than it would when rebooted after running a while. It isn't likely to be a problem with the power supply, since typically these either work or don't, but it isn't possible to rule it out completely until we have more information. The only way that the hard drive's power supply could have an effect is if it failed with a short circuit on the live side, which could be expected to pull down the mini's supply if it were plugged into the same power socket, though it would just as easily blow a house fuse/trip a breaker in that situation.