Finally, a problem...

Yesterday I had my first serious problem with my Mini. What happened was that my girlfriend inserted into the cdrw/dvd-combo station in the Mini a CD that the Mini had problems reading and tried to burn a copy of it with Toast. After that the Mini froze and kept the cd spinning. No, the CD didn't contain any form of copy protection, which I at first thought was the culprit.

What I did afterwards, I did a hard shutdown (ie pressing the powerbutton down for a couple of seconds for forcing the Mini to shutdown). After that when I booted it up, I kept the left mouse button pressed down in order to eject the problematic CD. When the CD ejected I was granted with the traditional bootup logo screen, and then just a blue screen reporting not any error messages of any kind (even the Windows blue-screen-of-death or the Linux kernel-panic error messages are preferred to none at all).

So I whipped out the MacOSX installation CDs and booted into the installation setup, ran Disk Utility, selected the partition I have OSX on and pressed Repair Disk. A moment afterwards, the partition table was fixed, and I rebooted. Everything worked after this procedure.

So, what have I learned after this incident?

1. Keep the OSX installation CDs close at hand.
2. Don't trust the internal CDRW/DVD-ROM combo station with CDs, use an external USB drive instead.
3. Make regular backups of important data. (This I did for the first time ever through Déjà Vu onto my removable USB HD).

My Mini have not had a serious problem like this for a very long time. I don't remember what the previous serious error was either. Of course there are issues, like the one with the internal CDRW/DVD-combo station having problems reading certain CDs and freezing up iTunes or the Mini.