[G4] hard drive madness

[John Bateman]

good afternoon;

i have an AGP G4 500, 1.12GB RAM, OS 10.3.9

i have various issues with hard drives that may or may not be related. 
been saving up the problems for a while.

my system has three internal drives: 2 IDE, 1 SCSI. i have 1 external 
USB 2.0 drive hooked up to a sonnet USB 2.0 PCI card.

my primary IDE works fine. no complaints.

my second IDE drive started glitching a bit yesterday... the icons next 
to the file names in column view were disappearing, and i repeatedly 
received an error message -50, file could not be written or read, when 
trying to move the files to another drive. i shut it down for an hour 
or so and was able to copy everything off of it. it's a 40GB maxtor, 
with about 20 GB free, disk utility checked it out alright once it was 
running again. should i format it and try again?

my SCSI drive does not ever mount in 10.3.x. once i upgrade to any 
update, the drive disappears and won't mount. it shows up in system 
profiler but not in the finder. i'd like to have it back.

my external maxtor drive won't remount if it gets unmounted due to 
energy saving techniques. i unplug it and plug it back in, and it might 
remount once in thirty times, but i hate having to reboot every time to 
fix it up.

it's almost time for a new system, maybe a quicksilver...

thanks

Thank you;

John Bateman
A+ Certified Computer Technician
(904) 982-4496