[dylanw]

I have a G4 466 with two ATA drives. This weekend, my hard drives disappeared.

I was reading e-mail and I got the spinning cursor that never stopped. So I restarted, but the machine wouldn't boot -- no apple startup screen or anything. So I put in the OS X install disk to run the disk utility. It boots from the CD fine, but the disk utility can't see either of the drives.

I opened up the box to make sure everything was connected, getting power, etc. Everything was in order, and the drives seemed to spin up ok. I booted with the Hardware Test CD, and it said that the mass storage was fine (how helpful). Finally, zapping the pram seemed to do the trick.

Except the next day, when it happened again, zapping the pram didn't help. Or any of the other stuff.

The machine seems ok, otherwise. Booting from the CD drive works. I can even boot from my iPod. Is the ATA controller dead? If that's the case, what's the best plan? Buy a controller card? Or put the drives in a firewire enclosure? While the machine was up, I tested the drives and they seemed to be OK.

Thanks for any thoughts or suggestions that people might have.

[reader50]

Reseat the ATA cables on the drives and motherboard. Try replacing the battery, many Macs can behave very oddly if the battery runs down.

Still no go? Remove one of the drives at a time and try to boot/see the other. One drive may have gone marginal, removing it may allow the other drive to work properly.

If that doesn't do it and the ATA-66 bus is dead, move the boot drive to the Zip bay as a temporary measure. That bay is on the ATA-33 bus which is still working if you can boot from CD. The optical drive will be set to Master, so jumper the moved HD to Slave.