[Pianomankw]

I have a 12" iBook G4 800 mhz. A while ago I started having hard drive problems. The computer would overheat about every 30 minutes and stay on less and less so the symptoms seemed it was a hard drive problem. So I bought a brand new 60 gb hard drive and installed it in the computer to try and reload the OS. But nothing. In the Disc Utility it said that the ATA wasn't even found. Well to make a verrrrrryyyyy long story short.......I ended up eventually buying an external firewire case and have been running the hard drive out of that for a few weeks now and it runs like a charm.
However, I don't want to spend the rest of my life carrying an external case around. I'm wondering if the problem is just the ribbon cable. I could buy one from ifixit.com for $20 but I don't know if this is the problem. I was thinking that if the problem was actually on the logicboard, the Disk Utility would't even have recognized the optical drive (which it did recognize).......would it??
I'm wondering if anyone has had any experience with this and if I should try to put a new ribbon cable in it or if this is just a waste of my money. Thanks!!!

[Waragainstsleep]

I believe the two ATA drives are Master and Slave in the iBooks, so you are correct. The ATA controller is obviously intact. For $20, I would risk it and buy the cable.

[Pianomankw]

I didn't mean to sound cheap when I was saying it was $20. It's just that that means that I have to spend an hour opening up my ibook and putting it in hoping that it would work to save me another hour of taken it back out. And I also ended up striping out one of the hex screws in the bottom from opening it so many times when i was trying to solve the problem. So it would take me a while to get that out.

[ibook_steve]

You know, you can test to see that the new cable works correctly before closing the machine back up.

Steve