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Ive got a mid 2012 mac mini which i have used constantly without issue for about 5 years. Today it seems to have developed a weird fault were it powers off by itself. I powered it back on just after lunch as it was off and when i came back it had turned itself off again.

At first i thought it might be a loose connection with the power cable or extension cord, but i checked them all and they are in tightly with plenty of slack on the cable.

As per suggestion in comments ive opened up the shutdown cause log and it seems to be caused by

localhost kernel[0]: Preview shutdown cause: -62 There are a couple of 5 listings also.

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  • Look for the shutdown cause in the log. See this answer for how to do that. apple.stackexchange.com/a/306722/119271
    – Allan
    Commented Jul 20, 2018 at 15:55
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    @Allan thanks for that link question updated, do you know if theres a place that lists all the error codes and their descriptions
    – sam
    Commented Jul 20, 2018 at 16:11

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It sounds like you might have an issue with the OS or an application that's crashing the OS.

  • A shutdown cause of 5 is a normal shutdown and nothing to worry about. It's saying that it "shutdown correctly."

  • Shutdown of -62 is generally due to an unresponsive application.

You should start with booting into Safe Mode to see if it's something being loaded.

Other options would be to wipe the drive with a clean OS (also a good time to upgrade the drive if you're still using an old spinning one).

Personally, I would start with booting from an external drive, a clean copy of macOS to see if the problem goes away before embarking on swapping out hardware.

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  • Thanks ill give it a try, i also called apple support and they advised me to look at activity monitor, see what was constantly using the CPU the most, which for me was a display link driver, ive disabled display link so im going to test if the issue comes back if not ill proceed with the above.
    – sam
    Commented Jul 21, 2018 at 11:30
  • it seemed to be to do with the display link driver, which was strange as it has been working fine for 5+ years. I updated the driver rebooted the computer and (touch wood) everything has worked well for the past week
    – sam
    Commented Jul 29, 2018 at 18:11

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