HELP - My Mac Mini May Have Breathed its last Breadth

I have a 3 year old Mac Mini. I came downstairs over the weekend to use it and it appeared to have frozen due to software update. So, I did the hard shutdown (held the powerbutton). When I restarted, I received the folder with a blinking question mark.
So, i took out my leopard CD and tried to reinstall Leopard. No matter what I did, I always receive an error message around Unable to Unmount Disk. This happened during installation. I also tried to erase the volume - same error message. I aslo tried to verify/repair. Now here, sometimes it would work and sometimes I would get the unable to mount error message. Regardless, if the verify/repair did work, when I went to either erase or install, I received the error message.
Then, I installed leopard on my external hard drive. Computer does boot up; however, it freezes (greyed out screen/lightbox with error message to restart by holding power button). This always happens about 3 minutes after the computer boots up. No matter what. What I was trying to do is boot up, go to disk utility and erase the Mac Volume, but again it always freezes before the process completes.
HELP

And in the future I am not downloading any software updates
Software updates are not the cause of these kind of problems. Failures of systems relating to software updates are almost invariably a symptom of something wrong in the system which may have gone unnoticed or unresolved, and where the update simply acted as a catalyst for failure. If updates were problematic in themselves, you would see hundreds of thousands of complaints here after each one!
The vast majority of users download and install updates without any problems.

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