Early 2009 Mac Mini boot problem - Need Help!

[sandro]

Just wanted to see if this has happened to anyone else, first time for me. I have an early 2009 Mac Mini Intel Core 2 Duo, works fine, just upgraded to Lion with no problems at all, Repaired Priviledges and the HD checks out FINE.

I need to start up from a disc and EVERY time I tell it to restart from the CD, it restarts, starts to read from the CD and then it reboots, and reboots and reboots, over and over again, and it doesn't stop until I force eject the CD in between reboots. I also tried an external DVD drive with the same results.

I've also tried resetting the PMU I think its called, by following apples instructions, "Power down, unplug computer for 15 sec (I did it for 3 mins), plug computer back in and reboot). This did not help either.

Do you guys have any other things I can try to get it to boot from a disc? Has this happen to any of you before?

Thanks for your help

 

[philipma1957]

you may have screwed up.

I gather you have a 2009 2.0 or 2.26. you can boot to lion with no problem and you are now trying to boot to a snow leopard or a leopard disc? or are your trying to boot to a lion dvd image?

if you have a second mac i think you can fix the problem without cracking the mini open..

 

[sandro]

you may have screwed up.

I gather you have a 2009 2.0 or 2.26. you can boot to lion with no problem and you are now trying to boot to a snow leopard or a leopard disc? or are your trying to boot to a lion dvd image?

if you have a second mac i think you can fix the problem without cracking the mini open..

The Mac Mini was doing that already before I upgraded to Lion, so I upgraded to lion thinking it may help, but it didn't.

I do have a couple of other macs on hand, what did you have in mind?

and yes I wanted to boot to a Leopard disk, my goal was to reformat the drive so I can reinstall leopard, erase all my data and give this computer to my brother.

Thanks

 

[sandro]

Problem fixed

ok, so looks like once my mini was updated to snow leopard, it no longer knew what to do with a Leopard disc. I found my Snow Leopard disc and it started from the SL disc with no problems at all, I just reformatted the disc and its almost done installing a fresh copy of SL.

Thanks guys