mac mini doesnt boot
My daughter was burning a CD from I-tunes and on the fourth track the time left to burn quickly jumped up to about 46 minutes and then froze. She tried to force quit but that didn't work. She held down the power button until it was off. From that point on, I only get the grey apple screen with progress wheel rotating and that is all. I've tried a number of solutions from various help sites to no avail. The only thing I can get besides the grey screen is the hardware test (which checks out ok), the open firmware screen and in safe mode I get scrolling text but with no ability to type anything once it stops scrolling. I have a 1.42 ghz mini with a single 256 Mb board. The hard drive and the cd drive spins and overall the unit sounds normal. I do not care whether I lose any data or not, I only wish to be able to boot again. 
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Also, what's the longest you've let the gray screen sit there with its progress wheel turning? I ask because I seem to remember something like this happening to me and out of desperation I just let the damn think think about it for like 2 hours and it actually finished booting.
Haven't had any trouble since, I have no idea what that was all about.
ideas?
Ok, I just powered it up the mac mini for the first time in about a week and after about 5 minutes I now have got past the grey screen and its a light blue screen with no icons on it. I can move my cursor around using the mouse though. Guess I'l let it run for a while and see what happens. Is this a hopeful sign ?
Try doing a safe boot by holding the shift key. The safe mode you refer to in the first post was perhaps single-user mode?
my girlfriend's computer just did the same problem, except it won't have anything on the screen. Just the sound of the fan turning on, and...nothing...
ideas?
Try booting holding command-v to get to verbose mode where you should see scrolling output about what your machine is doing. If you don't get anything, it may be a Ram problem. You would run the hardware test for the machine. Boot the system CD holding 'd' to do this.