I had an odd problem today with my MacMini that took me a while to figure out. My Mini boots off an external Firewire drive because the drive is quite a bit faster than the built-in version. I accidently unplugged the Mini late yesterday and when I hit the power button, the Mini booted off its internal drive and wouldn't show the external Firewire drive. After sleeping on it, I connected the drive to my Powerbook and it came up fine, but I was unable to get it to appear at all on the Mini. Other Firewire devices like my DVD burner and iPod worked fine. I initially figured it must be a drive problem. I perused the Apple support boards and reset the PRAM and PMU. Other suggestions mentioned updating the drive firmware, turning the Mini off for ten minutes, and using Disk Utility (which wouldn't see the drive). There seemed to be no way to get the Mini to see it and I started to think I might have to get used to it.
But because the drive would mount fine when connected to my laptop, I began to suspect the Mini. There were several topics about the Mini's occasional Firewire problems but I had tried most of the suggestions. Finally I tried starting up the Mini from a Mac OSX Tiger installation CD to use Disk Utility. Voila! The external drive was there! After running a Disk Utility check, I went ahead and upgraded the Mini's system software from 10.3.9 to 10.4. When I restarted it, everything was back in order and I could set the external as my boot drive.
Moral of the story: patience plus trial and error most always pay off.
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