getting past white screen of death

[Mr Downtown]

My 2011 Mini (running High Sierra) had been bugging me all week about wanting to do a software update. Last night i decided to restart the machine for other reasons, and to my frustration it seemed to be doing an update. I went and watched some TV. When I came back, it was showing a pure white screen. Unsure if it was still updating, I turned off the monitor and went to bed.

When I turned the monitor back on this morning, I was surprised to find it showing Disk First Aid. The month-old SSD that the machine should boot from didn't show in the list of disks.

I powered off, and have tried several times to restart holding down various keys: shift to go into safe mode, command-option-P-R to zap the PRAM, command-R. No results, and the white screen is up almost instantly when I press the power button and hear the chime. I power off by holding the power button 8-10 seconds, until the screen goes dark. Maybe I'm not fully powering down?

Suggestions?

[testcase]

Have you tried Command Option? That usually brings up all the drives available to start the machine. If you're online, you might even get the opportunity to boot from a Remote Disk.

[Sarcany]

I suspect that your Mac booted to Internet Recovery. If the SSD didn't show up at all in the DU, that suggests a bad drive-cable.

I'd remove the SSD and see if I could get it to show up as an external on another Mac, run a SMART check on it and then Disk First Aid to see if there's anything obviously wrong with it.

[Sarcany]

testcase wrote:
Have you tried Command Option? That usually brings up all the drives available to start the machine. If you're online, you might even get the opportunity to boot from a Remote Disk.

Just the Option key. To show the EFI Startup Disk utility.

Not Command+Option.

[Mr Downtown]

Ooooh. Just remembered something from last night. After the apparent software update, my Mac showed me two big, alternating, icons that meant nothing to me. One I finally decided was the underside of a mouse, with an arrow pointing to the power slide switch. The other was a flat rectangle with some sort of green slide switch on the left, arrow pointing to that, and a low rectangle like a CD slot on the right. I still have no idea what that represents. Some Googling said this happens when there's a problem with a Magic Mouse, but I don't have one of those. I swapped out keyboard and mouse both, but still can't get past the white screen. It's instantaneous as soon as I press power and hear the chime.

[Speedy]

Try out Target Disk Mode. If you get that to work, connect to another Mac via FireWire to see what you can do.

[Mr Downtown]

I can't get it to accept any key presses and do anything other than immediately go white. I mean it goes white simultaneously with the chime, suggesting it's in the initial boot.

I took the SSD out and put it on a USB connector. My laptop can't mount it, though it will mount my old (pre-November, smaller) SSD.

Could the system update have somehow bricked the SSD?

Frustrating, but SSDs are cheap nowadays, so I asked my buddy Jeff to send me one by Tuesday.

[Sarcany]

Mr Downtown wrote:
I took the SSD out and put it on a USB connector. My laptop can't mount it, though it will mount my old (pre-November, smaller) SSD.

Could the system update have somehow bricked the SSD?

If your laptop isn't running at least macOS 10.13, it won't mount the APFS volume from a High Sierra boot drive. But the Disk Utility should still see the SSD. Did you run the DU to see if the drive was accessible?

[Mr Downtown]

Laptop is running 10.14.6. Disk Utility can't see the new SSD, but it can see the old one that it replaced, which I still had lying on a nearby shelf. I wanted to rule out any problem with the USB connection.

[NewtonMP2100]

....black screen of death....matters.....