Need some Mac Mini help

[yg17]

My parents have a G4 Mac Mini. A couple weeks ago, it would no longer boot, and I came to the conclusion that the hard drive was toast. When I booted with verbose mode on, it said error reading hard drive block. When I booted from the Tiger CD, Disk Utility saw that the drive was there but no partitions. Same thing when I hooked my PowerBook up to it in target disk mode.

Last night, I put in a new drive. And upon completion, I'm not sure if I screwed something up and made things worse, or if there was something else wrong with the Mini, but something is seriously messed up. Here's whats happening:

1. It won't boot from a CD. The DVD drive is getting power, as I was able to put the Tiger installation CD in there, and it's spinning up and making noise, but I don't think the computer is reading from the CD. If I hold the C key, it will just sit at a grey screen for a few minutes and then give me the flashing question mark/sad Mac icon.

2. If I don't hold C, I also get the sad Mac icon, but I suppose that's to be expected with no OS on the drive.

3. I can't even get to target disk mode. If I hold T while booting up, it sits at a grey screen, then eventually gives me the sad Mac. Does TDM require an OS to be installed?

4. I can hold the option key on bootup and get the boot drive selection screen, but I have no drives to choose from. I should definitely have the CD as an option.

Any thoughts on what could be wrong? Thanks

 

[yg17]

Well, some progress has been made. I removed the hard drive, and now it's booting from the CD. Of course, can't do much without the hard drive, but I know the CD drive isn't completely dead either. Maybe I had the HD in wrong or something. But it's progress.


Edit: Yep, just as I thought. I didn't have the rows of pins lined up correctly on the hard drive. I put it back in, booted from CD, and the hard drive does show up in disk utility and successfully formatted. I suppose I need to troubleshoot, then post threads This can be locked or wastelanded or whatever the powers that be want to do with it.

 

[Foxile]

It's worth reading, just in case other have the same 'problems'

Glad it's all sorted for you.

 

[kingpikey]

Yeah, maybe someone in the same situation will read your post and fix their own problem. Glad you got it working. Nothing quite as gratifying as fixing your own problem.