Of course this thing had to wait until I'd spent days getting it set up to fail on me!
I had bought a 1.4ghz mini a year or two ago, tested it briefly to see if it worked. Internal optical drive is borked so I installed Ross' v8 CD and everything seemed to work. But the hard drive was tiny and I had other things going on, so I put the project away until recently. Scored a cheap NOS 160GB Seagate, installed that, then loaded Tiger and OS 9 systems. It has run well for about a week, as I have been organizing and installing various bits of software.
Until tonight! I'd restarted after installing Logic and at first I couldn't get mice to work. Any of them, in any port, in 9.2 or 10.4. So I started it in target mode and checked the drive and filesystems, which verified. Except since then when I start the mini, the graphics get corrupted and it hangs. In Tiger I get the initial gray screen, then the blue screen with the progress bar. Looks fine until the actual desktop, as soon as the menu bar and dock appear, it either freezes as-is or the display breaks up into vertical lines. Starting OS 9 it looks fine until it starts loading extensions and then just hangs - mouse still moves but boot has stalled.
Any ideas? Seen such behavior before? I'm stumped at the moment. And frustrated that I've maybe been setting it up for nothing.