2012 Mini not booting with external HDD connected

Tech Support
1

2012 Mac Mini, 4 external HDDs (all USB) connected. 2 USB drives, one 2-bay USB drive dock. The mini periodically needs to be rebooted, and for whatever reason it just won’t do so if the USB drive dock is connected.

And by “won’t boot” I mean no startup chime, completely black screen, no errors, no nothing. It wouldn’t be a big deal except this Mini is in a rather inconvenient place.

Can anybody think of a reason for this? None of the drives in the dock have the “bootable” flag, if that matters at all.

2

Are the externals powered by the usb? Might be too much startup current needed and causing problems with the Mac. Have you tried a SMC reset?

3

In this case the external enclosure that won’t let it boot is a drive dock with its own power source. The SMC reset is worth trying though. :slight_smile: Thanks for the idea!