I have an old Mac mini that freezes couple of seconds after reaching desktop

[trevorplease]

I have an old Mac mini on OS X 10.5 I think.

It’s used for scanning and OCR reader. The only other things attached to it are windows keyboard mouse and a WD back up.

One day it just started freezing within the first minute of reaching the desktop. The time in Finder freezes. The mouse will move but it beachballs as soon as I try to click something.

I can boot into safe mode and it won’t freeze but I don’t have any of the discs that came with it to run a diagnostic. Having a windows keyboard I’m not too familiar with all the short cuts for diagnostics either.

Is the computer just dead? I read multiple articles and forum threads and tried some suggestions but nothing works.

I can’t seem to reset the memory or run diagnostics I don’t think it was made for that early version of OS X. I tried making a new user in safe mode but same thing happens on regular start up

The activity monitor on safe mode seems to show the RAM and CPU running normally and I was able to verify disk permissions and repair disk permissions. But repair disk itself is grayed out

 

[bobesch]

What mini - G4(PPC) or early intel?
Year/model?
Maybe HDD becoming corrupt.
Your WD for backup: is it a bootable clone backup, so that you can try to boot from external drive?
Do you have another Mac and make a clone copy of the mini when in TargetDiskMode and then use that clone for booting? When in TDM you may also be able to run disk repair ...
You can find Leopard at Macintoshgarden and a repair guide for drive replacement at ifixit.
Depending on what mini you may also refer to your question in the PPC or Early Intel subforum for larger audience ...