Attention Mac guys

this sounds like a disk failure to me, but I've forwarded it along to a mac-obsessed friend.

Well that would suck. Especially since Apple is not very generous with their warranties (90 days only). Mac-Mini's use laptop hard drives as well so there's a premium cost to replace one.

Actually, Apple gives 1-year warranty with their products.

The trick is that it only comes with 90 days of *support*. If you call, you have to pay the support fee, but I think they refund it if it turns out to be a warrantied hardware failure.

It's odd. Mainly because laptop hard disks are made considerably better than desktop models...they can take more of a beating before failing out. And because the mini has been sitting quietly in the corner of my desk for all this time. It's not like I jarred it around or anything.

Betcha I pop this open and find a crappy Toshiba drive instead of a better model like a Hitachi. (they gotta keep tht price low somehow) Looked up the procedure to replace the drive and it's no small task.

Drive isn't a total loss as it does spin up. Maybe just a few bad blocks. Know if OS-X handles bad block mapping adequately or not? I can always pop the drive in my laptop and run SpinRite to map out the failed blocks..

DiskWarrior has been recommended to me for recovering lost or damaged filesystems and disks on Mac systems.

But keep in mind that all modern embedded-controller drives (i.e., anything IDE or SCSI) have automatic sparing. Any time the drive has difficulty reading or writing a sector, the sector will normally be automatically relocated. If you get I/O errors on the drive, it generally indicates severe damage that is beyond the capability of automatic sparing to correct.

There is only two cases when automatic sparing will fail. The first is the obvious case when the drive runs out of spare sectors. The second is if the sector is damaged to the point that it cannot be read at all (i.e., beyond the ability of the embedded error-correction codes and automatic retries to recover). In this case, the drive will not move the sector, so that if in the future the sector becomes readable or if you send the drive to a recovery business, the associated data will still be recoverable.

If this is the case, then forcing a write to that sector should allow the sector to be automatically relocated, and may bypass the problem.

However, I would not trust any drive that has ever returned a bad sector error with data that I did not want to lose.

With a USB -> PS2 adapter I was able to get it to boot the install disc. Aparently the mini initialized and goes past the boot time interrupt keys faster than the KVM switchbox can transmit the keystroke.

Once I got into the first aid console things looked a bit better. Unfortunately I got the dreaded "incorrect number of threads" error on the file system because the kernel had a panic moment. The drive was OK but the whole file system was toast and couldn't even mount the volume. Had to totally erase the disk and reinstall Tiger all over again. Lost a bunch of files. :-( Couldn't even copy them off due to the unmountable volume problem.

also:

If you suspect a hardware issue, I would suggest TechTool Pro 4
(http://www.micromat.com/tt_pro_4/tt_pro_4.html), as well.

friend says:

11:19AM [sabi] uh yeah, that'd be a disk failure

You can try booting into single user mode and running fsck.

To boot into single user hold down openapple and s while powering on.

To boot off the cd hold down the c key. When you boot into the install run repair permissions from the disk util before reinstalling.

If neither work then try plugging a keyboard directly info the mini.

Will try that. Don't have a USB keyboard on hand. I'll have to buy one (or an adapter)

An adaptor would be cheaper, or I could always drop mine in the mail for you as I doubt we'll be using it at work. If so, I could always get it back or something else.

Since I need one for my tech kit anyways, I'll just buy one. They're only $8. Thanks.