Tried holding down mouse button, doesn't work. Also, the eject button was removed from the optical drives in the Minis (well, the PPC Minis as far as I know). Seriously....the little PCB is there, but no button. After much Googling, the only option is to unscrew the top of the optical drive and remove the disk, which I'm not going to do because it's going to screw me out of my AppleCare.

So, here's where I'm at: In my last-ditch effort to get the data off the drive, I'm going to be installing Tiger onto an external drive, booting the Mini from that drive and then finally running Data Secure II to try to get at it. Of course this is complicated by the fact that I'll have to install Tiger on the external drive from my iBook, which only has a CD-ROM. And I only have one USB-to-IDE unit.

So, I'll have to connect a bare DVD-ROM to the USB-to-IDE unit, make disk images of the Tiger DVDs, then remove the DVD-ROM and mount the hard drive, then open the disk images and install. Hopefully this will all work and by tonight I'll be able to get to the data. The *BIG* reason I need to get at this is because I have 3 years worth of Quicken data on the drive, which, of course, I stupidly did not have a backup of anywhere.

After all that's said and done, I'll be bringing yonder Mini back to the AppleStore so they can start working on it...I'm guessing that in addition to the hard drive, they may end up having to replace the optical as well...