PPC Mini Mac - Damaged OS, CD Stuck in Drive

Greetings,
A friend brought me her broken Mini Mac today. Apparently she turned it off as usual one evening and the next day it would only boot up to a gray screen and eventually an old OS 9 logo flashing a question mark. Sounds like a corrupt system to me.
I tried resetting PRAM, NVRAM, and PMU all to no avail. I booted into Open Firmware and reset-all which also did nothing. Still have the gray screen which eventually displays the OS 9 logo/question mark.
Booting into the boot loader showed no operating system installed, or to be specific, it showed nothing at all except a refresh arrow and an arrow pointing to the right.
To make matters even more complex, there is a CD in the drive that refuses to eject. I have tried holding down the left mouse button on power up, that didn't work. I held down the "T" key, wouldn't boot at all when I did that, I just got a black screen and no hard disc spin.
I then booted back into Open Firmware and typed "eject cd" only to have the error "can't OPEN the EJECT device" after waiting for about 5 minutes for a response.
So . . . . is this thing a paper weight at this point? Is there any recourse short of pulling it all apart to rescue my friend's data from the HD? (Oh the joys of teeny tiny screws.) Is there any way to physically eject a CD from one of these drives? On "standard" drives there's a opening that the end of a paper clip fits into to force an eject.
Thanks ahead of time for any and all assistance.
Peace,
Gail

Hi,
the first thing you should do is find another Mac, and a Firewire cable to hook them both up. You start the working Mac with the FW cable connecting it to the Mac mini. Then you start the Mac mini while you press "T" on its keyboard. After 2 to three seconds, the Mac mini's display should depict a Firewire symbol, while the HD and CD of the Mac mini appear in the Finder of the host computer. Eject the CD like you would on the Mac mini, and it should come out.
From there, you should also start the Drive Utility and check and repair the HD, which could already fix the problem. Then backup the most important data.
Otherwise, you are free to insert the Mac mini's Installation CDs to start from them, diagnose and reinstall the system.
Hope that helps!
Immo

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