Odd problem while installing XCode 6 beta 3

I installed XCode 6 beta 3 a few times on several Mavericks OS and had no problem.  But today do the exact same thing on a clean Mavericks OS installation (on the first OS partition on my MacMini late 2009 model), I got error while "components" were being installed.  And then after I tried a few times, the problem went away.  That is so ... odd ...

And then the machine eventually frozen up.  And I thought, damn beta software.  So I tried to bootup to a clean clean Mavericks OS installation (first disk partition).  In fact, I went so far by yanked out all the USB connection, so now everything is running on the MacMini itself.  Eventually, after waiting for a long while, the system bootup, but then it get hanged, and stuck there with the spinning beach ball.

With that I am pretty giving up on this machine.  It's pretty much unusable unless I spent time to open up the machine, either try testing the memories by swapping memory sticks, or swap out the harddisk, which I tend to think that is the real problem.  But basically the Macmini is dead to me, not even reliable enough to be used as a download machine.  As of now, the screen was loaded, and then just hung again.  RIP MacMini.
But
I found the OSX Mavericks VM provides me much better the usage and development experience.  But OSX Yosemite 10.10 Preview 3 was pretty slow.  So for now I'll probably just stick with OSX Mavericks VM .

Keeping MacMini (late 2009) Alive

I brought my MacMini (late 2009 model) back in  ... errr ... late 2009.  It was a good machine since it was quiet  and reliable.  Flash forward to 2014, it is still quiet, but not reliable anymore.

First the Windows 8.1 (64 bit) that I installed on it using BootCamp crashed and I couldn't get it back to running consistently after 2 attempts.  At the end I decided to stick with Mac OSX Mavericks by installing the OS on various partition of an external hard disk.  In fact, I was that was the strength of OSX, which allows me to install OS on external hard disk instead of forcing me to install OS on the primary hard disk of the system.

Problem is, though, that I frequently got crash on these OS installed on partitions in an external USB 2.0 hard disk.  In fact, I even got crash and hang up even when I tried to install OSX Mavericks on those partitions.  I was confused, and wonder if there's something wrong with this external harddisk.

At the end, I used to Disk Utility, ejected all partition of the INTERNAL hard disk, set up 3 partitions, and then installed OSX Mavericks clean on the first and then later third partition.  (I planned on using the 2nd one for beta OS in the future)  And in these 2 times, the process was pretty stable.  So at least I found a pattern that works (instead of seeing installer stuck for hour and eventually forced me to hard restart the machine)

I only used the 1st partition (mainly as a clean backup) OS for a short while and found that it seemed pretty stable.  So I went a head adn installed the same OSX Mavericks on the 3rd partitions as a real work partition.  Things seemed working fine throughout the install process. but after the OS up and running and I started a bit configuration, I got this crash:

panic(cpu 1 caller 0xffffff80030c5b9a): "Possible memory corruption: pmap_pv_remove(0xffffff8029e71ad0,0x10da28000,0x8000, 0x8000000, 0xffffff8104d63cc4, 0xfffffe8d70906140): null pv_list!"@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-2422.110.17/osfmk/i386/pmap_internal.h:763

This is odd, because in the last few days dealing with tons of crash on OS installed on external harddisk, they were mostly crashed because of file corruption or other disk related error.  So I am actually starting to worry about the there's something wrong with the MacMini itself.  If so, I may need to buy a new MacMini.  I will keep observing it.

BTW, I still couldn't get OSX 10.10 beta installed on any of the partition, but I tried of diagnostic the problem and decided to skip it and simply wait for the final release.  Besides I can still study what I need to learn on XCode 6 beta 3, which runs fine on OSX Mavericks anyway.