mac mini dead video card and external drive at the same time

Hello all,

It could be the heatwave that we are having in Italy right now, but i have a major hardware problem.

I have an older intel mac mini, with a 1TB firewire attached. Things have been working swimmingly for 8 months or so; i never have had a problem and hardly ever restart the thing.

Today i restarted, and noticed the screen didn't come back on.

I plugged my laptop into the screen, so i know thats working. Played around with cables, nothing! Seems like video card is dead.

I then noticed that the external drive was making a ticking noice.

I can log into the mini via VNC, and i saw that the hardrive wasn't mounted, i plugged the disk into my laptop, nothing. Just aforementioned ominous ticking sound.

I tried looking into system profiler at the video/display section. system Profiler crashed (this could be a problem with vnc as it pretends to be a screen).

So i have a dead video card and lots of lost data on 1TB disk.

Am i lucky or what?

Anything else it could be? praying..praying...praying.......

Another thing i have noticed.

When i VNC into the computer, i can vnc with the primary user ok, when i then login with the second user, thrn log into that user with the vnc, the image is totally corrupted. Completely unsable. What is that?

Plus, anyone know if good USB-hdmi video cards that work with the mini?


thanks.