[G4] What Have I Done To Deserve This

[Aaron]

There have been so many posts in this thread that I may have missed something relevant to this, but:

Do you have a FireWire external drive that you can try booting from?* Or a FireWire-to-IDE adapter you can use with the Maxtor drive? If you do, you may want to try booting from an external drive without any internal drives connected to see what happens, in case there's a problem with the internal IDE bus. (You can also try a different IDE cable, if you haven't done so already.)

 - Aaron

* Most FireWire (but not USB) drives are bootable with the PPC Macs, but NOT most of the Western Digital MyBook models -- even those they recommend for the Mac! And, although I've had no problems using a MyBook Premium Edition drive as my startup disk, the other two MyBook drives I've used (neither of which will boot the PPC despite having FireWire connectivity) have been problematic at best. So, while WD internal drives are fine, I strongly advise against their MyBook external drives.