AAAARRRRGGGGHHH!

Last night my Late 2012 Mac mini started acting out: lots of pinwheels, momentary hangs, sluggishness followed by sudden bursts of high speed catching up, etc.. I went through the normal troubleshooting, shut down unnecessary apps, ran diagnostics, checked the log files and found no apparent reason.

Oh well there is always the sovereign remedy for inexplicable glitches — Reboot. The progress bar seemed to progress slowly until it got to about the 90% level and went into super slow motion. After about five minutes I gave up and did a full shut down followed by a restart. Once again at about the 90% level the progress bar hung again. This time I decided to wait it out.

After ten or fifteen minutes the progress bar finally completed but still the boot did not complete. Nine hours later, it still had not completed. Time for a reinstall, so I created bootable High Sierra reinstall disk (an adventure in and of itself). It booted flawlessly and I launched the High Sierra installer and attempted to reinstall on the internal SSD formatted APFS (encrypted). Every disk was there including another volume formatted APFS (encrypted) and a volume formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted) but the internal SSD remains among the missing. Disk Utility, TechTool Pro, Drive Genius, About this Mac, Startup Drive, nothing is seeing the internal SSD so there is no way to either repair the volume structure or reinstall High Sierra!

It occured to me that the system may not see it because it is formatted APFS (Encrypted) but there is a rotating rust Drive with an APFS (encrypted) partition and the system not only sees it but requests the password to access it and utilities that see drives at the hardware level do not “see” the SSD, so I cannot even attempt any kid of volume repair.

A few days ago hardware level tests, including S.M.A.R.T., I/O speed tests, etc. gave the drive a clean bill of health. I have had rotating rust drives fail in the past, but never as suddenly and as profoundly as this. frown mad

I had hoped to keep this Mac mini going until Apple came up with a newer version, but that decision may have been taken out of my hands. I can get by running on external drives for a while, but I guess I am officially in the market for a new Mac. Anyone out there with experience running a MacBook or MacBook Pro closed lid with an external monitor, keyboard, and trackpad? confused

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein