On Friday I was enjoying some streamed music on my Mini (Macmini2,1) when it beachballed for no apparent reason.. Only iTunes was running at the time, streamed from the library located on my NAS. It's sitting behind a power conditioner, so I'm sure it's good current.

I rebooted it after about 2 hours of waiting for it to un-beachball and resume playing my music.

It rebooted into the white screen with the grey Apple symbol in the middle and the little clock dialing in the middle, and then after about 15 minutes the Apple was replaced with a circle with a line through it, sorta like the "No Smoking" symbols, but without a cigarette through it.

Same thing happens today when I started it up.. :(

Is it dead?

sounds like the hard drive is bad.

Can you start up from an installation dvd?

I would have to agree, try the installation disc, if it boots immediately it's the hard drive.

Sounds like the OS is damaged not the drive. You can boot from a back up and repair your drive.
Or even erase and mirror back your back up

Sorry to interrupt this thread, but I was just wondering why so many "help" posts are in this forum rather than the mac-ipod-help-troubleshooting/ (http://www.ehmac.ca/mac-ipod-help-troubleshooting/) forum?

I understand some folks may mistakenly post here because they are unaware of the other forum, but shouldn't mods be attempting to enforce it nicely so that this forum remains free of all those posts?

Or should the other forum be shut and should all help posts be included in this forum?

Sounds like the OS is damaged not the drive. You can boot from a back up and repair your drive.
Or even erase and mirror back your back up

'Tis correct!

When the prohibitory sign (aka the Ghostbusters sign) shows up, generally it indicates that the system has found and recognizes your installed OS as a valid OS, but cannot boot from it because of some problem with the system.

Try to boot to Safe Mode and try to fix permissions, run any system updates and finally remove any recently added apps (if any) that may be causing an issue.

If none of that works, reinstall OS X.

Sorry to interrupt this thread, but I was just wondering why so many "help" posts are in this forum rather than the mac-ipod-help-troubleshooting/ (http://www.ehmac.ca/mac-ipod-help-troubleshooting/) forum?


You're right, I don't notice so much because I mostly view by "New Posts".