Troubleshooting help, Bootup, I/O error?

[RJag]

A neighbor having given up on this Mac Mini gave it to me yesterday. This afternoon I hooked it up and am attempting to troubleshoot it to figure out what the problem is.

What I have is according to the sticker:
Serial: YM83574LYL1
MAC MINI 1.83/2X512/80/COMBO/AP/BT-USA

This is the first mac computer I have ever owned/ worked on but I do have a lot of experience with PC computers.

It will start and then during loading you get a stop screen indicating that it needs a reboot in several languages. It always ends at this screen, though sometimes it will show a folder with a question mark before going to the restart screen. I am using only monitor, keyboard, mouse.

Looking things up on the net I tried safe mode 'shift' at startup, with no change. I then tried to reset the memory using Command + Option+ P+R, it cycled a couple times and still behaves the same.

Then I tried command+V and it went through the first portion of it's startup and then halted after displaying the following code.
[img]http://postimage.org/image/hjcjvk6x9/[/img]

It seems everything is ok until it hits a Level 3 I/O error.

Am I looking at a bad harddrive in this system or do I just need to do the mac equivelent of a reformat and reinstall of the OS? Sorry if I am a bit dense but as I said before I have little experience with Macs. Can any old harddrive work in a mac mini or does it take the equivelent of a laptop hardrive?

Thanks
Rick

[Smithcraft]

Well, nothing would be lost by trying to boot from the install disc and see if Disc Utility can see the HDD, and try and format and install a fresh OS.

SC
_________________
Grumpy old man of computing.

[Desktop] G4 mini - 1.5Ghz 1GB 80GB HDD - Newer miniStack v2 500GB - 10.5.8

[Media System] Intel i5 mini - 2.33Ghz 8GB 500GB HDD - 4 x Hitachi 2TB HDD in a qBOX-SF - 10.7.5 (Thanks Phil!)

Make sure it has pins!

[billb]

The folder with the ? indicates that
your Logic Board (Mother Board) can't
find the OS on the Hard Drive during
the boot (start up) process.

So, your Logic Board or your Hard Drive
or both are bad or going bad.

My 2₵.
_________________
2011 Mac mini 2.7 GHz i7 with
16GB RAM, Samsung 512GB SSD
MacBook AIR 11 Inch
Mac mini, Model 1.1, 2.33 GHz C2D Proc
20" iMac G4 PPC

[macmanmacman]

i would say logic board and for that old of a model you might just want to replace it with a new mini because that models board from apple is a 500.00 replacment part not worth the time to fix