How to fix a mac-mini

[gauntalus]

Hello everyone,

I was lucky enough that a good friend of mine decided to let me borrow his mac-mini for the entire semester so I could learn to program in cocoa, etc. However, I've run into some difficulties.

When I received the mac, my friend basically gave me the okay to do with it whatever I wished, so none of the following has disturbed him in any way.

As soon as I got the little guy hooked up, I started playing around with it and decided to upgrade the OS and some software since he hadn't touched it in months. I started downloading updates for OS X when poof, my power goes out. When the power came back on and I booted the mac up it came to the inital gray screen with the white apple logo in the middle and just hung. On several reboots I get the same behavior, blank gray screen with a white apple in the middle.

He didn't have his OS X cds with him at school, but he had a bootable .iso of CD 1 of OS X, so he sent that to me. I burned it to a CD and turned the mac on, waited a minute so I knew it was as far as it was going to get, and fed it the CD. Note that I didn't force the CD in, I just slid it in until the drive sucked it out of my hand.

I waited a minute and nothing happened, so I turned it off and turned it back on hoping that it would boot to CD. Unluckily, the mac still booted to the blank gray screen with the apple logo, and now I have no way of getting the CD out so when his OS X disc gets sent up from home I can't even load that into the drive.

Traditionally I've been a linux user, so I don't have the slightest Idea how to fix this mac, could someone with some experience offer a helping hand? :doctor:

 

[gauntalus]

Just to clarify, when rebooting the mac when i was trying to get it to boot from cd I did hold down 'c' when rebooting.

Additionally, I tried to get the the command line by booting it then pressing and holding "Windows key + S"

Note that I'm using a USB-to-PS/2 adapter for both mouse and keyboard, the mouse and keyboard are for a dell PC.

 

[Jewel]

Also dont you just hold the cmd and mouse click to eject the cd durgin bootup? or something like that. It as to do with something about holding the mouse button.

 

[rman]

Here is what I see. You have a corrupted install, due to the power loose. You may also have a problem with the CD you created. It may not boot. I suggest that you get a full install of the OS.

 

[gauntalus]

I looked around the net a bit, and it appears that the ps/2 keyboard won't work until booted all the way into OS X. So to test that theory I plugged in my usb optical mouse, booted it up and held down the mouse button. Zip, the cd popped out. Looks like I just need to get a pure USB keyboard to be able to issue those commands...