2011 mac mini boots with no display output

Try a PRAM Reset (hold the PRAM Rest for at least three chimes).

Holding the Shift key during boot allows the computer to boot into Safe Mode.

To boot into local Recovery Mode requires using Command + R, or to boot into Internet Recovery Mode requires using Command + Option + R.

If this doesn't help, then the two most likely issues are a bad internal Hard Drive, or a bad CMOS/PRAM Battery. Removing the PRAM Battery should allow the computer to boot.

If removing the PRAM Battery works, then replacing it should solve the problem....the battery holds some configuration settings in the PRAM (aka NVRAM) so without the battery any custom settings will be gone after the power is disconnected. Date & Time and default Startup Disk are two of the settings that will be wiped, but it is possible some network, display, and mouse settings could be as well.

I have worked on a lot of 2010, 2011 and 2012 Mac mini's over the years. Mostly to upgrade their HDD's to SSD's.

For some reason this was a common problem with the 2011 Mac mini. Two out of three that worked on, had fried and/or burnt GPUs.

To be honest, I'm not sure if it is the GPU, bad Thermal Paste or a warped Heat Sink that caused the GPU to overheat and fail. I never saw or had that problem with the 2010 or 2012 Mac mini models.

den.thed wrote:

I have worked on a lot of 2010, 2011 and 2012 Mac mini's over the years. Mostly to upgrade their HDD's to SSD's.

For some reason this was a common problem with the 2011 Mac mini. Two out of three that worked on, had fried and/or burnt GPUs.

To be honest, I'm not sure if it is the GPU, bad Thermal Paste or a warped Heat Sink that caused the GPU to overheat and fail. I never saw or had that problem with the 2010 or 2012 Mac mini models.

Interesting, I never saw that with any of my organization's Mac Minis. In fact, our Minis were usually the only Macs which didn't require any service other than replacing worn out or failing hard drives.

IIRC, these Minis had integrated GPUs within the Intel CPUs.

The 2010 had a NVIDIA GeForce 320M

The 2011 2.3GHz had a Intel HD Graphics 3000

The 2011 2.5GHz had an AMD Radeon HD 6630M

The 2012 had an Intel HD Graphics 4000

IIRC the two out of three 2011 Mac mini's that I ran into with cooked GPU's, were the 2.5GHz / AMD Radeon HD 6630M models. I re-pasting one and that helped for a year or two. So I really can't say if it was an overheated CPU or GPU that caused the heat sink to warp enough to loose cooling across both the CPU and GPU.

Currently I still have 2 2012 Mac mini's with SSD's in service as Media Servers.

Thanks for confirming. I guess the 2012 model skewed my memory of the older models since that is the one I had the most recent access besides the 2014, or perhaps we just had the Intel only models for the 2011's. I hardly ever saw most of our Minis. ;-)

I guess my organization just got lucky.

I'm always glad to learn something new (or old?).