<p>I have one of the first PPC Mac Mini's and I haven't made any changes to it (still has the original 256 memory in it). Last week, it started letting out a post-like beep when I was trying to shut it down, then spinning up it's external drive and locking up (spinning beach ball, Finder unresponsive). I chalked it up to it not liking the external drive, and just went on using it as is. In the last few days, it's now doing it in the middle of when I'm using it. I checked the external drive, and it's working as it should. I have it ejected for the moment to see if it makes any difference. It's fine when I start it up, and when it does beep, the power light doesn't blink. It has also been revving the fan pretty hard, but I'm not sure if this is related or not.</p>
<p>I'm normally really good at fixing this stuff, but this one has me stumped. Of course, this is the Mini that had the first known instance of a dead FireWire port being revived by a PMU reset. Is this the start of some kind of hardware failure, is it not liking the drive or is this my OS X install going bad? Any other ideas?</p>