2011 Mac mini won't boot — light and fan turns on but not the monitor

[virusys]

Hi there,

I'm having a problem with my mid-2011 Mac Mini. Essentially it won't boot— the power light turns on but doesn't produce a chime and no signal gets sent to the monitor. After a few minutes the fans will turn on.

A bit more background on the problem— I have been having issues with this computer becoming really hot, so I installed smcfancontrol to keep the temperature manageable. I also have been using another external fan pointed at the Mac mini at the same time. Lately the computer has been running really slow, and finally yesterday it shut off for no reason and entered a reboot loop, chiming rapidly and repeatedly.

At this point I decided to open up the Mac mini and clear all the dust inside with some compressed air. I discovered there was quite a bit accumulated, and got rid of it all. After putting it back together I managed to boot into the login screen one time, but then it somehow shut off again while I wasn't paying attention and is now stuck in the state I described above.

Resetting the SMC doesn't work, nor does any combination of keys upon start up, whether it be booting in safe mode or resetting the NVRAM. I have also tried booting taking out one stick of RAM to no avail. It simply never sends a signal to the monitor (and I've tried multiple monitors) and the only thing that happens is the power light turns on and the fans will activate after a few seconds. What do I do in this situation? I need my computer for work.

Thanks for your help!

 

[harryb2448]

G'day band welcome to the forums.

I think the time for action is when the heat started. For mine, fan control software does not resolve a problem, and may well make it worse by not allowing the Mac sufficient cooling if you toned down the fan speeds. First up try re-connecting the display after reseating the gfx card, but I think you need an appointment with your local Reseller.

 

[ferrarr]

Try to hold option, when you turn on your Mac, does this work? Do you have an external drive you can connect and try to boot up from? Maybe a USB installer or a clone?

 

[chscag]

No boot chime and the fans going full blast denotes a serious hardware problem. Very likely your logic board is toast. Like Harry stated above, letting it heat up like that for so long was not good for the machine. And usually fan control software only masks the real problem.

 

[virusys]

Thank you for your replies so far — I'm kicking myself now because I have been thinking about clearing out all the dust for a few weeks now since the machine has been slowing down significantly and heating up quite a bit, but when I finally get around to cleaning it it decides to bite the dust (excuse the pun). Quite a bit had built up, but I didn't think it would be enough to kill the machine.

I'm going to try and make a USB boot disk to see if that works but I'm not feeling optimistic. I may have to call a shop to see what they say or just go ahead and look for a suitable replacement.

 

[virusys]

Hey everyone —*so I managed to find a similar model in my city being sold for a decent price —

It's the Mid 2011 Mac mini, 2.3 GHz i5, with my 16 GB of ram and 500 GB SSD replaced from my old mac.

It's actually running a lot smoother and faster than my old machine so I'm guessing the heat really did a number on it.

Would you say this would have been a motherboard issue or power supply issue? I'm going to call a repair shop about this at some point (I'm still thinking of repairing my old machine to possibly re-use or re-sell).

 

[harryb2448]

Sorry too far away for me to tell lol.