One of my friends around the bend thought it would be a good idea to show off some slides from his website, on his friends TV connected Mac Mini. Only problem was that he tinkered too much with the resolution settings, and rendered the Mac Mini incapable of displaying anything at all. This can be upsetting, and in this case was mildly more than that. Our common female friend thought it was less than amusing, as she doesn't even own either TV or Mac Mini, and the owner would come back to his apartment within a short narrow time frame. Out of his wits, my friend obviously called me for desperate help.
What do you do, when neither restart or take the power cable out makes any significant difference? Call Dr. Mac : )
Well anyway, I thought I had to try different options so I brought my landlords old first generation iMac keyboard to hook up to the Mini, as it only was equipped with a wireless keyboard. Wireless keyboards takes a backseat when it comes to troubleshooting a problem as they are first recognized when the computer has started up right.
But my remedies were not working, as either zapping of the PRAM (a list of default system preferences being zapped by holding down a number of keys during boot, or deleting the windows preferences file through single user boot. This is very technical, but in layman terms it means that what I had hoped would work, didn't.
By some heavy thinking I came up with a solution, which is posted here for your convenience, should you ever be so unlucky of being in a situation with a Mac Mini and a TV stating: Invalid Format.
1. Restart the Mac Mini with a connected USB keyboard. Hold the T button down, until a nice big firewire symbol fills the screen, or just hold it down for 15 seconds.
2. Connect a firewire cable from the Mac Mini an external mac laptop. Remember this has to match in terms of processor type. Intel Mac Mini + Intel Laptop, or PowerPC Mini + PowerPC laptop.
3. Restart the laptop, holding down the option key to get a list of disks to boot from. Choose the disk of the Mac Mini that is connected via firewire. Click the restart button underneath the selection.
4. You are now starting up on you laptop as the Mac Mini. Once logged in, go into System Preferences via the Apple menu, and choose "Sharing" Put a check mark under "Screensharing". Make sure to note the network the Mac Mini is connected to (wirelessly).
5. Restart both the laptop and the Mac Mini, and disconnect the firewire cable.
6. Once again the screen will go black and give you an ominous error message, but fear not. Help is on the way. Once the Mac Mini and your laptop has fully restarted, and you join the same network on the laptop; Take a look at the sidebar in an open finder window under "Shared". Here is the Mac Mini, and next to it a button called "Share screen".
7. Click the Share Screen button, and type in username and password. Voila, you now have access to the Mac Mini remotely.
8. Find the Displays option under System Preferences, and fiddle until you get the settings right, and the TV once again displays an image.
Good luck!
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