Mac 101: Boot options

Hi,

My colleague's G4 Mac Mini is unable to boot into OS X. It loads the Apple logo (grey screen with spinning black circle).

Nothing happens even if its left for an hour on its on.

I've tried the following

1. Inserting OS X bootup disc then rebooting with "C" held down. Nothing happened, it still went to the grey screen and not the installer screen.
So I had to eject the disc by holding down the mouse button on the next start up.

2. Holding down "Shift" as I powered up the Mac Mini. Nothing happened, it still went to the grey screen and stayed there for the next 30min

3. Connecting it to firstly my Mac Mini (Intel), then later on my iBook G4 in Disk Target mode (as per the instructions on the Apple webpage). The target disk did not show up on the host on both times I tried. I also tried rebooting the hosts, but to no avail. Still the grey screen with spinning black circle.

4. Followed instructions to reset PRAM & NVRAM.

None of the steps I took above worked. I used my own USB keyboard & mouse from my Intel Mac Mini.

Her Mac Mini last broke down in Feb 07, and a "Inter Connect Board" (Part no. 922-6894) was replaced. Could it be the hard disk giving problems now? I wish I can do a Disk Utility check on it. :(

I'm not confident of opening up a Mac Mini, so I would like to ask if there's anything else I can do other than get it serviced by trained professionals?

Thanks!

Anyone found a simple way to get the Mac OS boot manager to always appear? Other than using rEFIt or BootPicker?

Something with nvram boot-args perhaps? To simulate the Option-Key down...

Guys, this app called rEFIt adds an automatic bootscreen to the startup, so you dont have to hold down any special keys to start it up. Get it here, I couldn't use bootcamp without it.
http://refit.sourceforge.net/
Image: http://refit.sourceforge.net/img/screen2.png

Coolest thing my MacBook has done this week:

I put in a new, bigger hard drive, and in doing so I cloned my old one on to a USB drive, intending to migrate all my stuff back to the new drive once I'd installed OS X.

You see, I didn't know the Mac could do what it did.

I turn on the Mac with the new (blank, unformatted, unpartitioned) hard drive in it, and before I knew what was happening it booted to the USB drive with my clone info on it.

I had no idea Macs could boot from USB drives. I knew firewire was OK, but USB?

So up comes my system, exactly as it had always been, and I'm able to use disk utility to partition the new drive, and then Carbon Copy Cloner to copy over my system. (Super Duper!, which I purchased, is still not Leopard compatible. Wah!)

No problems. Back in business in no time at all. Migration Assistant would have taken HOURS, but this was fast and simple.

So I salute you, Mac OS X Leopard, for being able to boot from a USB start disk. It blew my mind that something that was so OBVIOUS and CONVENIENT was so damn natural to my favorite OS.

Things like this make me loathe Windows and cringe whenever I have to deal with it, anymore. It's like going from sitting in a restaurant ordering steak, to being plopped in the jungle without weapons and having to make weapons before I can even kill the animal and eat it raw.

Windows is raw meat stabbed to death with a sharpened stick compared to OS X.

"You can force OS X to boot from a mounted optical disc by holding down the C key."

Uh, not exactly, since the optical disc isn't mounted until startup is complete. And in fact most bootable optical discs (such as OS X Install discs) never mount, since they don't display a desktop; they just startup the computer and go directly into the Installer or other application (e.g. DiskWarrior on the DW CD).

You can turn on a Mac, quickly slip in a CD or DVD, then press the C key to get it to start from that disc.

How about Mac 101 articles on FTP and BitTorrent? Or would those be Mac 201? Thanks in advance.

Kewl. It's been a while since I ran the key commands and was looking for my cheat sheets. Now I have it. ;)

Mat, how did you get the option character to show up on the page? Is there a keyboard shortcut for that? I looked in the page source and didn't see a code for it either...

had to safe boot last night. while trying to do the iwow/volume logic leopard hack, i lost my volume control and had no sound out options in my sound prefs. the odd thing is that my 12" pb safe booted into my external drive running 10.4.11. after i rebooted back to my internal 10.5.1 drive my volume prefs showed back up. odd that my pb did that, but thank god for safe boot!

Have found trying two new wired Apple aluminum keyboards hooked to a Mac Mini that the keyboards are not recognized until the end of the boot up sequence, therefore none of the boot up key combinations work. The only way is to use the remote menu button until Apple gets it's act straight. I have tried to contact Apple to no avail!!