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Announced on October 16, 2014, identifiable by the model number A1347 and EMC 2840.

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Using a 2.5" SSD as the only hard drive.

Hello all,

I have a Late 2014 Mac Mini. Upon opening it up, I noticed it had the PCIe slot for the hard drive (it was bought without a hard drive). My idea was to pop in 2.5” Crucial SSD and that should be okay.

Went ahead and bought this pack of tools + SATA cable:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B06Y...

and used the one that looks like this:

Mac mini A1347 (Mid 2011-Late 2014) Upper SATA Cable

But each time I try to install the OS through Internet Recovery Mode or even a bootable Yosemite USB it fails to install. It can detect the hard drive, erase etc.

All I can think of at the moment is that I left the PCIe cable connected - haven’t tried taking it off and then trying.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Ray

crwdns2886500:0Replace a malfunctioning or torn SATA hard drive cable for a Mac mini. In a 2011 or 2012 model Mac mini configured as a dual hard drive server this cable fits the second or upper hard drive. In a 2014 model Mac mini this cable fits the single hard drive.crwdne2886500:0

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Mac mini A1347 (Mid 2011-Late 2014) Upper SATA Cable

$19.99

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To be clear your system came with a PCIe blade SSD and you now want to add a second drive. In your case you want to add in a 2.5" SSD.

Do keep in mind the PCIe blade drive interface can only support a PCIe blade SSD. It is also the default boot drive.

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You need to format the SSD to HFS+ and then run the installer - it isn’t like Windows where it does it for you during the installation process. Depending on what Internet Recovery installs, it may be converted to APFS. Pick up a DRAM SSD because you practically need it with how APFS behaves unless you want to keep the PCIe SSD (in which case, use APFS if available).

If you don’t want to deal with APFS, it may be avoidable but you will be limited to High Sierra since Mojave-present is APFS or no updates. You will need to get it through the dosdude1 patch tool to avoid it as Internet Recovery goes off of the latest compatible version.

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Hey Nick,

Thanks for your response. So I've managed to get a bootable USB with Mojave on it so I can use Disk Utility to format the hard drive to APFS but when I attempt to install Mojave it says that I need to update the system firmware. Any ideas?

Also, tried then install Yosemite but it says the hard drive should be formatted in to install.

I do want to eventually upgrade up to Mojave one way or another.

Thanks again!

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Also to add, when I have the hard drive formatted in the usual Journaled thing, the error on installation is:

'an internal error occurred while preflighting your volume for apfs conversion'

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Lets run diagnostics to see what it shows us. Restart your system and press the D key

Reference: Mac startup key combinations

Let us know what error message you get.

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Thanks @danj - I'll get back to you today on this...

crwdns2934271:0crwdnd2934271:0crwdne2934271:0

Hey @danj , sorry for the delayed response - been a crazy couple weeks. Okay, so I've run the diagnostics all came back fine. No issues - ref code ADP000

Any ideas?

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