PPC Mac Mini Issue

[Roy Hobbs]

My mother-in-laws Power PC Mac Mini stopped working the other day.
After booting to disk utility and seeing that there wasn't a hard drive mounting I assumed the hard drive was dead.

I ordered a replacement from OWC, opened the mini, and put in the new hard drive. Now I can't get the mini to boot from CD all I get is a blank gray screen and eventually the folder with a question mark icon.

Any idea?? I was under the assumption I could boot to disc again, format and reinstall on the new hard drive. I also can't get the CD to eject but it is spinning up .

Any ideas??

 

[Roy Hobbs]

No suggestions at all??

Help please

 

[Zygon Gambit]

Maybe it's not the hard drive that's broken...? Could you test the one you removed somewhere else?

 

[Lord Zedd]

Boot holding the C on the keyboard, if that does not work boot holding the option button and select the CD.

 

[Roy Hobbs]

Maybe it's not the hard drive that's broken...? Could you test the one you removed somewhere else?

Yes, the drive is dead....I put it in a external enclosure and Disk Utility did not recognize it nor did it spin up.

 

[Roy Hobbs]

Boot holding the C on the keyboard, if that does not work boot holding the option button and select the CD.

Neither of these work.....for some reason it doesnt want to boot from the CD. I can here it spinning up but it always tries to boot from the blank hard drive.

I think I may slap the new drive in the external enclosure and try to install OS X on it from a different mac

 

[ADent]

You can try to hold option down when booting.

You can try putting the drive in an external case. If that doesn't work disconnect drive, boot from CD . Then connect the external drive.

 

[harixvirex]

Mac Mini Gray Screen - A solution which works at last

Folks,

Atlast having tried a lot of options but invain..... Here is one thing which worked after


1) Tried booting from CD and "C" key holding - NO GO!!
2) Tried to perform a Network boot - NO GO!!
3) Tried to perform a Target Disk mode to reset MBR record using the Firewire cable and "T" key - NO GO!!
4) Tried to zapp PRAM by Apple+Optio+P+R ~ NO GO!!
5) Tried to reset only NVRAM by Apple+Optio+O+F ~ NO GO!!


At last....2 commands one after the other help me



1) Boot into Open Firmware using Apple+Optio+O+F
2) Type "reset-nvram"
3) Type "reset-all"

without the quotes....

Then i got a and the machine started booting into Leopard / Tiger.....


Was sucessful with 3 mac mini machine......

HTH...

Hari S