Help! My Mac mini won't reboot

Hi. I posted yesterday (in the Safari forum) concerning a problem I was having with Safari 3.0.4 after updating to 10.4.11. Basically, it wouldn't run. Anyway, I did a bunch of searches on the Web (including this forum) to try to figure out what to do. One piece of advice was to move System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.frameworkapplicationservices.fram ework to the desktop.
Well, I did that, and things started acting weird. I tried to copy it back, but the process just seemed to hang. So, I did what I thought was obvious but was apparently a bad idea: I rebooted. Guess what--now my Mac won't reboot. I just get a perpetual hourglass.
I tried doing repairs with Disk Utility, but that didn't fix the problem. I also did a superfluous Hardware Check from the same OS disk, and that turned out normal.
So, what's the solution? A visit to my friendly Apple dealer for some service? Or am I just permanently hosed with no recourse? Please let me know what I can do. Thanks!

Sadly Apple stores are rarely set up for the purpose of completing backups and securing data, so that's not something you can rely on them to do. Some Apple approved service providers are better equipped for doing this, but in the end, it's not a good (or comfortable) proposition to trust your data to anyone else, and the more important that data, the less good, (or comfortable) it is if you have to.
The risk of data loss is relatively small in this situation - particularly if you ran 'repair disk' from disk utility and it reported no errors. That generally would indicate the drive is healthy and there are no indications of damaged data or file structures. Still there is always a risk!
In your situation, if I were faced with the knowledge that I was going to be buying an external drive for future backups, I'd be inclined to buy it now (selecting a firewire-connected hard drive of at least the same, if not much larger capacity than the internal), and then run Disk Utility again, this time (carefully) selecting the external drive, partitioning it under the Apple scheme, then formatting it (MacOS Extended (journaled) and then installing MacOS on it from your 10.3 installer. After that, I'd boot to it by holding down the option key during startup, then selecting the external drive from the list that (after a couple of minutes) should appear. Then the internal drive will be mounted on the desktop under the external which has booted the system. That will give you to option to copy your iPhoto and iTunes libraries to the external drive, and thus secure your data.
Once that's done, you can reboot to the install disk and basically even erase and install, because your data is safe on the external drive!
After the internal is set up again, and fully updated, it then becomes a simple matter of moving your data back to it, and then erasing the external once more, and setting up your backups with SuperDuper! or CCC.
It might sound like a bit of messing about, but that would keep your data safe in your own hands!

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