PPC Mini Mac - Damaged OS, CD Stuck in Drive

[Anlace]

Greetings,

A client brought me her broken Mini Mac today. Apparently she turned it off as usual one evening and the next day it would only boot up to a gray screen and eventually an old OS 9 logo flashing a question mark. Sounds like a corrupt system to me.

I tried resetting PRAM, NVRAM, and PMU all to no avail. I booted into Open Firmware and reset-all which also did nothing. Still have the gray screen which eventually displays the OS 9 logo/question mark.

Booting into the boot loader showed no operating system installed, or to be specific, it showed nothing at all except a refresh arrow and an arrow pointing to the right.

To make matters even more complex, there is a CD in the drive that refuses to eject. I have tried holding down the left mouse button on power up, that didn't work. I held down the "T" key, wouldn't boot at all when I did that, I just got a black screen and no hard disc spin.

I then booted back into Open Firmware and typed "eject cd" only to have the error "can't OPEN the EJECT device" after waiting for about 5 minutes for a response.

So . . . . is this thing a paper weight at this point? Is there any recourse short of pulling it all apart to rescue my client's data from the HD? (Oh the joys of teeny tiny screws.) Is there any way to physically eject a CD from one of these drives? On "standard" drives there's a opening that the end of a paper clip fits into to force an eject.

Thanks ahead of time for any and all assistance.

Peace,
Gail

 

[mad jew]

You mentioned holding down T, were you attempting to boot into Target Disk Mode via Firewire with another Mac?

 

[Anlace]

No. I understood that holding the "T" key down while booting would give the option of which disc to boot from. My thinking was by doing that I might somehow be able to eject the CD in the drive.

 

[mad jew]

You're thinking of OPTION. T is the key to enable Target Disk Mode which allows a computer to be accessed as a regular external hard drive via Firewire from another Mac. You can install OSX using the optical drive in another Mac with Target Disk Mode. Perhaps you should give that a try... On the other hand, it'd probably be better to get to the bottom of your current problem before installing OSX again.

 

[logandzwon]

Target mode still might help though, boot into target mode, connect to another mac via firewire and then use disk util to eject the drive.

Anyway, sounds like the machine has major issues.

 

[Anlace]

Solved!

The problem was a dead battery. I pulled the case apart, popped in a new one and all is working beautifully once again.

Peace,
Gail