[bacon goldstien]

My ibook is on the fritz.

I have an external firewire drive that I am booting off of.

In the past the computer would restart normally, but now it rarely recognizes the internal hard drive? WTF. I have tried all the usual suspects--pram, PMU, force x, change startup disk, all to no avail. What is going on?

[Detrius]

Does the internal hard drive show up in the Apple System Profiler?

If not, you either have a bad drive or a bad logic board. It's possible it's the cable, but not likely.

This stuff happens. Hard drives go bad. Back up your data if you can. Take it in for repair.