My girlfriend’s computer is a powerpc mac mini she bought off of ebay last year. The other day, she rebooted for a security update and it wouldn’t boot back up. Turn it off, turn it on, it goes bing and then shows a greyish blue screen and then does nothing. Turn it off, wait a while, turn it on, same thing. So we look on teh internets for similar symptoms, there’s some posts about an osx update from 2 years ago causing something similar and a post from powermac days that sounded vaguely similar, but neither one led to any fix on this computer. So she called the local apple store and hit the button for tech support and was transferred to apple care (she doesn’t have apple care coverage). So they took her name and address and asked what the problem was and they very politely said give us $50 for this incident for this month, and if that doesn’t fix it, we’re gonna want $50 more next month for the same problem we didn’t fix. That sounds great, she though! Just kidding. The apple care person did get us a reservation at the apple store for some free help, though. We went down and the guy there was very helpful and knowledgeable. He tried all the things we tried (clearing the pram, trying to get it into firewire target mode) and a couple things I couldn’t get to work at home (boot to open firmware) and then some stuff we didn’t think of (using another computer in firewire target mode). But no luck.
read on to find our workaround…
At this point, the key symptoms were that in open firmware, “eject cd” froze/crashed it, it would never go into firewire target mode and the boot menu would load partially and then freeze/crash. The guy at the store thought it was the interconnect board, which is a daughtercard between the motherboard and the cdrom drive, hard drive, fan and speaker. He told us the part was $36, but that apple wouldn’t sell it to us without installation. The board with installation was $125. We asked him if they replaced it and that wasn’t the problem, if we’d get a refund and he told us their policy was to charge $85 for a diagnostic that would tell them what the problem was exactly and if we wanted to at that point, we could apply the $85 to the $125 board replacement (or apply it to whatever the problem actually was). Not a bad policy – I just wish it were cheaper. He told us that compusa might be able to sell us just the part, or maybe macmouseclub (both have local outlets here). So we called macmouseclub and went to compusa. Each wanted $90 for it and we’d have to wait for it to be shipped. That’s too close to the $125 apple wanted. So we gave up for the night.
The next day, I cracked that bitch open and tried removing the board and cleaning the contacts with isopropyl after blowing out all the dust bunnies. No luck. I’d have booted it up without the interconnect board in place, but that’s the only place the fan gets power and I didn’t want to melt the computer (or start soldering it yet). So I removed the cdrom drive and the hard drive and booted it up, since the problem was somewhere around there. It didn’t crash. Promising at least. I hooked up a firewire cdrom drive to it and threw in an osx boot disc. It recognized that and offered me the option to boot osx or a hardware test. I opted for the hardware test. It took a while to load for some reason, but I finally got to do the test and it took about 15 minutes and told us that the ram was okay and the video ram (after some nifty screen effects) passed, the modem was found, there was no airport found (I don’t know what this means, since HNL only about 20 minutes away 
), the logic board passed (how I would determine if this is a reliable statement if the logic board was broken in the first place is beyond me, and of course this calls into question the rest of the tests, reducing my confidence in the whole process a bunch…) and the mass storage test has not been run. I’m impressed that this program didn’t crash while trying to access the drive when both the open firmware, firewire target mode software and boot menu software each did. I suppose it’s slightly different, since the drive isn’t plugged in at this point.
So I had the hard drive in an external laptop-drive sized usb case and checked its contents with my computer and burned some dvds of the contents just in case something went wrong and the drive was wiped. Yes, that has happened to me, thank you for asking. The drive was fine and the data on it was intact.
Plugged the usb drive into the mac, rebooted with the option key held down (to get into the boot menu) and it found the cdrom drive and gave me the same two options as before, but no usb hard drive. Odd that osx doesn’t let you boot from a usb drive. Anyway, I have a spare usb/firewire case on my desk, so I plugged the drive into that (after finding my 2.5″ to 3.5″ converter board) and turned it on and rebooted her computer and it found it fine. So I clicked on that drive to boot it and it worked like normal. Yay. I woke my girlfriend up at this point to tell her that it worked (it’s about midnight at this point – did I mention computers suck?) and she seemed thrilled.
I tried the slot-loading cdrom drive in my old laptop. It just sits on the bios screen forever, detecting the drives. This is a good sign, since it’s probably the cdrom drive that’s broken.
So that’s where it sits right now, didn’t even put the cover back on the mini. Next thing to try is plugging the hard drive back in and leaving the cdrom drive out. Maybe that’ll work. It wouldn’t matter that the slot-loading drive was absent, since she has an external dvd burner anyway.
