Tried to install the 10.5.7 update last night...

1) attempted to download with firefox, grey screen...asks for reboot
2) attempted to download with safari, grey screen , asks for reboot
3) tried again, downloaded successfully but fails during install
4) tried again to download the update ... fails with grey screen

Now I am thinking it might be bad RAM, I opened up the mac mini to take out one slot of the ram.

upon boot in now, Spinning wheel of death

Took it to the Genius bar..

They were able to see the drive but cannot mount it while booting into their External Hard Drive....

They referred me to data recovery guys...

Before I spend thousands of dollars recovering the data.

What do you guys think I should try ?

thanks and I greatly appreciate your help

Hello I don't know how much I can help I bought a mac mini should get it soon coincidently I will be installing ram and updating to 5.7 idk I'll try and see if there's anything that would help

PROBLEM Solved:

iT was bad ram... what a mess.... I had to repair my HD from a Windows machine using Mac Drive 7 ... then isolate the bad ram

Funny my new mac mini has the same problem I just installed 2 gb sticks of ram, when you say bad ram what is that