Stuck booting to gray screen with spinning disk inside
A bit thank you to all of your who take the time to answer.
I have a 2009, Mac Mini with 10.6.7 installed. It has a 100GB BootCamp partition set up with Windows XP SP2 installed from a Retail Disk. Everything has been working fine until recently I it is now booting to the gray screen. Turning off & restarting usually gets rid of the issue, but now I am permanently stuck booting to the gray screen (No logo or spinning gear.) After a couple of minutes, the screen goes black & I am forced to turn off the unit. The issue is that I have a Windows bootable CD inside the drive which seems to spin up & then nothing happens. I am unable to eject this disk at this time. I have x3 other 2009 Mac Minis with similar configurations (Win XP, Win Vista, Win 7) & this is slowly occurring more frequently on each.
Just to be clear, I am stuck b/c there is a windows bootable CD in the drive which I am unable to get out to pursue using Mac or Windows Install disks to check/repair anything.
I have attempted the following:
1. "Command +Option+P+R" does not respond.
2. Holding either/both "Option" buttons does work.
3. Pressing eject button does nothing.
4. Left is unplugged for a while & attempted again.
Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.6.7)