Okay - this first generation 1.25GHz Mini has been good to me. It'll almost be two soon. In the last three months or so, it's had two little blips.

For the first of them about three months back, Mac OS X hung in the middle of normal tasks (Safari, Mail, Word) and wouldn't respond to any keys. I have an external Firewire HDD permanently attached and when I forced the restart by holding down the power button, when it restarted it showed my backup drive only and not the internal HDD. At that stage I thought perhaps the HDD was just kaputt, that I'd buy a new one and since everything's backed up it wasn't a big deal. Then when I next turned the computer on, the HDD was found again and OS X started booting from it.

Then, 2 hours ago, Mac OS X crashed again just in the course of normal events. When I rebooted, only my Firewire HDD was showing again. I stuck in the install disc and tried rebooting about 5 times holding down 'C' to try to boot off the DVD-ROM, but with no success. I had thought I was pressing it at the wrong time or something, because the Mini just kept on going on to load OS X from my Firewire backup... Then I realised that the computer was simply not recognising the DVD or internal HDD drives at all...

So I pulled the Mini apart and apart from the fact there was a bit of dust around the vents in the case, everything appeared normal enough. Both the HDD and DVD are connected to the MoBo by a riser card, but nothing was disconnected. I just cleaned out the dust, took the DVD drive out by the pins and stuck it straight back on again and did nothing else... I snapped the thing back together and rebooted, hoping that doing nothing would have worked...

And the DVD drive started working again. I ran disk utility off the DVD and lo and behold it was now recognising my internal HDD as well. It listed an error on the HDD and I repaired it, and am now typing from OS X running off the internal HDD...

Only problem is that I'm now running a Mini whose HDD has failed twice and which had its optical drive fail as well. If I had the ready cash, I'd probably use this as an excuse to get a new Mini to play with, but I don't.

Has anyone else had problems with hard disk or optical drive failures on the mini? Is there any chance that it's just a matter of replacing one of them or replacing the riser card? Or if it happens again do I just have to admit that the Mini as a whole is basically kaputt, and I can run it only through external drives?

Maxim..

you could have a pending issue with your hard drive, i.e. smart failure. open disk utility & check that the drive 'smart status' is good. a drive issue can in some instances cause your machine not to recognise it's optical drive & vice versa. interface connectors hardly ever give problems unless they've been handle a lot. the only way to which is the problem is to isolate the devices from each other. i.e. run the mac without dvd connected or off external drive with only dvd, to see which device is causing the problem.
overall, mac minis are pretty good, .. as a technician i take my hat off to whoever designed that mac....

Not quite but close - I would not worry about your optical drive.

I had some problems with an iMac G3, which also had the optical and internal hard drive on the same bus. When the hard drive was malfunctioning, it also appeared to take out the optical drive. As soon as the hard drive was fixed (in this case, it was a jumper problem) the optical drive was recognised and fully functional.

So I would not worry about the optical drive, but I don't know whether the hard drive may be an issue over time.

The ability to have an alternative backup boot drive permanently attached via firewire is one of the things I really appreciate about Macs - I explain to windows friends how easy this feature makes backing up and it can take them some time to understand how simple and effective the solution is.

Thanks for your replies. From the sound of things, if the hard drive starts acting up again, just replacing it with a new one will probably solve the problems (and be a lot cheaper and more practical).

I checked SMART status and it says 'verified', so I suppose that is what I want. I also installed SMARTReporter, because although I'm not sure quite what it does, I imagine it might give me a heads up just before the next incident (assuming it happens again).

If I do get a new drive, I'm supposing that I can replace it with any 2.5" ATA drive? An 80GB 7200RPM drive should make things much nicer, you would think.

yep, any 2.5" ata drive. get up to 160Gb now.

smart reporter will be good in the instance your drive does have smart issues. still , you need to be aware of running out of space & checking the condition of your drive every couple of months.

good luck!