Early morning heart attack....

I woke up this morning and my mac mini wouldn't start up. It gave me the finder question mark.

I was really annoyed.

But the really nice person on the applecare line helped me sort things out. I had put in the mac mini hardware test DVD - but it wouldn't boot to it (holding down "C"). Nor would it boot to single user mode (holding down "cmd-S"). Nor would it let me eject the CD after I had gone into open firmware (holding down "cmd-o-f" then "eject cd"). I ended up having to use the mini as a targeted firewire drive and run disk utility from a laptop - which fixed the probem. Oy. I hope it "just works" from this point on. An added bonus though, the guy on the phone line indicated that it would cost around $400 bucks to replace the harddrive on my powerbook - though I can try a stopgap measure of using reformating and re-partitioning the harddrive. This stopgap measure will not account for the fact that the harddrive is deteriorating and bad sectors are proliferating. Ok. Hopefully this will be the last post in a while dealing with my computer problems.