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My Mac Min won’t boot, getting a flashing ? This is now the 2nd time the hard drive has failed. The first time I had Apple repair it, they replaced the HD with new/same model. So It seems better to just replace with an SSD then have Apple repair with slow crappy HD? I would like to do this upgrade myself. My hard drive was not backed up and I want to salvage anything I can. I’m not close to anything and stuck with slow Satalite internet. I made the attempt to boot in various modes with no luck. My problem is if I’m able to install new drive how will I be able to boot without installing the OS since the HD may be damaged, and my other laptops are running 10.5.8, FireWire, and USB2 only. I still would need to clone the drive for the new drive, is this correct? At the moment I only can access the internet with my iPhone. Any advice appreciated Thank You

Well, you have a bit of work here! The first thing is how far you want to go. The hard path is taking your system apart to pull out the HDD following this guide Mac mini Late 2014 Hard Drive Replacement and then install the replacement drive Mac mini Model A1347 Late 2014 SSD Upgrade Kits. You then still need to access your old HDD externally to try to recover the data. The easy path is to add in the needed ribbon cable connector and a blade SSD OWC Aura Pro X2 MacMini Add-On Kit and here’s the guide to install it Mac mini Late 2014 PCIe SSD Cable Replacement. As we are leaving the HDD in its place we can access it using its current connection once we get the system setup with the new drive. OK so thats the hardware side of the issue. Now the fun part of getting your system setup with an OS. Your other Mac is using an OS thats too old for your Mac Mini so we can’t use its OS for your mini’s recovery directly. We will need to download from Apple the a newer OS. I recommend you install Sierra macOS 10.12 on your Mac mini. So, after ordering the needed kit and getting a fresh USB thumb drive … Step 1 Is to download the image file from here How to upgrade to macOS Sierra jump down to Step 4 for the direct link to the file you’ll need. Step 2 Is to prepare a 16 or 32 GB thumb drive on your other Mac. Using Disk Utilities format the thumb drive with GUID and a Journaled file system. Step 3 Is to follow this guide How to create a bootable macOS Sierra installer drive from your working Mac. Step 4 Is to install the SSD (either way) Step 5 With the thumb drive plugged in, restart your Mac mini and press the Option (⌥) key on your keyboard to get to the Startup Manager, select the thumb drive at which point you should be able to then format the new SSD (again GUID Journaled file system) and install the OS to the drive. Reference: Mac startup key combinations Once your system is running try running Disk Utilities > Disk First Aid function on your HDD see if you can get it going enough to copy off to your new SSD what you need to save. I would then reformat the drive hopefully you can get a bit more life out of it. Let us know how it goes!

Get your new SSD in a USB enclosure and clone your other laptop running 10.5.8. Now swap this onto the failed macmini. Carefully replace the old HDD into the USB enclosure - and it will appear as external storage. ideally, you could USB-boot with some linux based rescueCD (http://www.system-rescue-cd.org/) - use the software called gparted. This can clone your existing HDD into SSD. Just a try… your old hdd may give up or just allow you to copy. see https://gparted.org/ you can use the so called (trial version is OK) Carbon Copy Cloner https://bombich.com/