Prob at start up after installing new mouse

Question

I have had this mini about 18 months. I got a new mouse by Kensington. A ball mouse. I installed the software and left the disk in and hit re start as they suggested. it shut down, but then on start up, it went nuts. the screen went black and these words typed out fast that said error DSN or something, 8 errors on DSN start up, job threatened, re-something or other then it counted down erasing each error i thought ... then the screen went dark and this line of words flashed on top, just one line, and it kept ramming this sentence over and over and finally i knew it was in a jam and i shut it off manually. now when i turn it on, i get the white screen with apple and the spinning dial ... but nothing after that. the disk is stuck in it. what can i do to get the disk out? what can i punch on it to get it past this block? what happened? is it fried?

Answer 1

Hi.
It's not fried. You have directory damage.
There's no manual eject hole in the Mini.
In order to get the disk out of the drive, attach a USB mouse and hold down the mouse (if it's an Apple mouse) or hold the left button and turn the machine on, it should spit the disk.
If it's a PowerPC Mini, you can also try booting into Open Firmware (hold CommandOption+OF at startup) and type at the prompt:
eject cd (hit Enter; it will eject the CD)
Put the OS X install disk in the drive and type:
reset-all (hit Enter; it will restart the machine)
and hold C at startup to boot from your install disk. Then go to Installer/Utilities/Disk Utility and repair your startup volume.
Good Luck.