[Googer-Giger]

My Mom's got an older Mac Mini. It started getting slow, like I'm talking extremely slow. I rebooted it after she complained and even if I got to the boot manager for boot camp (cause she has windows) the mac partition wouldn't show up. It doesn't even boot into windows, the windows screen loads and then it just goes black. I hooked it up via firewire to my G5 in an attempt to get the data off the disk so I could reformat it, I get an NTFS error message. Before I waste my time reinstalling OS X, should I even bother? or just pickup another drive?

Also, the hardware test doesn't even show a drive as being there, so I guess the drive is done.

[turtle777]

Or a fatal disk data error.

The "getting slow" part hints at a hardware issue though.

-t

[cgc]

Open DiskUtility and check the drive's S.M.A.R.T. status.

[seanc]

That will only work if you can boot from the OS X installation CD, since the machine no longer boots.
Points to hardware failure to me, stick a new drive in.