Did my Mac Mini 'die'?

[kioshi]

Hi guys,

After a OS X lockup (ball of doom) I had to use the power button on my dual core 1.66 Mac Mini to restart it.

After I started it, it would just show a white screen (no apple logo, no loading circle) and after about 2 minutes the screen turns black with a prompt I can't type anything in (a prompt like in command line or MS-DOS).

It's still like that. I tried:

1) Unplugging power cable and all peripherals for 2 hours, then for 30 minutes... Same.

2) Alt key to try my Windows partition or my external FW drive, and nothing.

3) Reset PRAM and nothing, it's like it's not recognizing the keyboard commands (tried with 2 keyboards, one of these I'm using now on my old imac g3 400)

4) Tried to start with the mouse button to eject the CD (Mac Drivers from bootcamp) so I could try the system DVD, but I can't get it to eject the current CD (is there another way?)

5) Tried to plug it (turned off of course) to my iMac via Firewire to try target disk mode - the mini won't start via FW because it seems no key command works (so I pressed T and nothing happened, no FW symbol - well as I said even trying to reset the PRAM didn't work). My iMac recognizes (at system profiler) there's another macintosh plugged to it but since I cant get the mini to start on target, I can't access it.

I've never had it not recognize the keyboard at the start so I can't reset the PRAM, can't eject a CD to try the system one, can't use target disk mode with my imac... Is there something very wrong with my Mini? Like, that cannot be solved by a regular user?

Any help would be really welcome. Thank you very much.

[Rhisiart]

Try this and this.

From personal experience it could be a hard disc problem. Unfortunately, Mac Mini's are not easy to self-repair. The components are packed in too tight and can be damaged, for instance when changing a hard disc.

[kioshi]

Thanks for the answer Rhisi. Unfortunately neither resetting the SMC (since my Mini is Intel) nor trying to eject the CD stuck with a paper clip to the left side worked. Doesn't seem like a HD problem to me since I can't even do the usual stuff on booting...

Anyway I never changed my Mini's HD, just the RAM but that was more than 1 year ago, I've had it for 1 yr and 3 months.

[Rhisiart]

I suspect this need an Apple dealer repair. Is it under warranty? They may well change the RAM and HD. Backups up to date (he says just checking mine!)?

[kioshi]

Yeah I'll see if I can take my mini to a dealer this week. I mean even the manual eject button in the left side of the drive's not working... Although I still think it may be related to the CD stuck inside (it's the mac drivers CD from bootcamp, been there forever), because my problem looks a lot like this (although the CD is a normal one as I just wrote).

It's out of warranty, backups are 'kinda' ok, I know I have a backup im Time Machine, not very recent but anyway some of my important stuff (pictures, real big apps) are in my firewire HD anyways.

[Rhisiart]

Let us know how it works out.

[freereg]

yeahh this can happen happened to me when i tried to install bootcamp and had a non xp sp2 so to remove the disk power on the mac mini and hold down the mouse button