making use of an old mac mini hard drive

[BuzzB]

I was a PC to windows convert with the arrival of the mac mini and rushed out to buy one (80G HD, 1.4, 500MB RAM). It catastrophically failed a few days ago and the genius bar at the local mac shop said that the motherboard had failed -apparently a very rare event. One of my options was to buy a hard drive caddy, remove the hard disk from the mac mini, insert the hard drive and use it as an external portable drive. I've done this and hooked it up to a windows laptop (running XP pro) but it doesn't even recognise the hard disk (the green light on the hard disk connector is on). I've even tried downloading HFS explorer but that doesn't help either. Have I missed something or is the hard drive broken too? Any other options to rescue my data on the hard drive?
Many thanks!

[Doctor X]

Well . . . I do not know what your situation is with regards to computers--you have one? You have 27?--but would you consider getting a newer Mac?

Or . . . have you considered getting a new logic board--ebay? Other online stores? I do not know how hard it is to replace on a Mini--Gurus can help you--but I did it on a Pismo Powerbook successfully, so it cannot be that hard!

Assuming the Geniuses diagnosed the problem . . . that will fix your Mini . . . then you can try your HD.

If it was JUST the HD, you should be able to "boot" it off an installation or various repair disks. Since I assume you cannot do that, it is probably a hardware--possibly logic board--problem.

Anyways, if you get a newer Mac, most stores will happily transfer data. Or, if you give the specs of the HD you have, a Guru here may be able to tell you how to connect it to your newer Mac to save your data.

Best of luck!

--J.D.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

The reason you can't "see" the hard drive on your Windows machine is because hard drives used in Macs and formatted for Mac OS X are formatted in the HFS+ format. Utilities such as MacDrive, and, as you know, HFSExplorer should allow you to "see" the files on the Mac hard drive.

Do you meet all the requirements for running HFS Explorer, namely, the Java 1.5 runtime environment?

[BuzzB]

Thank you for the comments.
I do have a couple of old PCs – one of which always meant to be turned into a Linux server. But that’s a project at the bottom of the list. The PC in question though was a laptop that belonged to my wife – and there’s the rub. She omitted to tell me that she had dropped the laptop and one of the USB ports didn’t work. I stupidly didn’t try the other USB assuming that the more complex issue (reading a mac hard drive on a pc) was the problem. So, HFSexplorer works really well and the IDE hard drive caddy does its job and all that data is saved for an outlay of only £/$8.00. The new logic board would have been $/£ 275.00 which seemed a waste as a new mac mini was only £381.00 and that would have been with iLife08 and Panther. I’m not sure that I would buy another larger mac though – I’m not sure I can justify the extra expense. So, back to a PC until the credit crunch is over and then I'll be able to check out the gorgeous gems that Apple has to offer!