hard drive won't show up

i'm trying to reinstall os 9 onto a G4 and when I boot from the mac os 9.2 cd, the hard drive won't show up. i can't go into the utilities and initilise the hard drive since it's not there either. when i boot into OS 9 and use either Disk Warrior or Norton Disk Doctor, it always says that there not enough memory/cannot replace original image/or crashes on me. the hard drive always says that it has Zero K available of storage, which says to me that it's bad to the core, thus why i wanna reformat and reinstall os 9 again.

so can anyone help me? thanks!

have you tried formatting the harddrive with the Norton CD ?

Mr Bobbins said:

have you tried formatting the harddrive with the Norton CD ?

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Can't do that. When i boot from the Norton CD the hard drive doesn't show up, only the cd-rom drive. When I boot into OS 9, of course then the hard drive shows up, but it won't format the hard drive as it's the startup disk.

That's odd. Did you try the search for extra drives function ? on the Norton CD.

The only other option i can think of involves having an extra harddrive with which you could install the system on and then install the other one as a slave drive and then wipe it.

I take it that the hard drive has always worked in the past and hasn't just been installed with the wrong jumper settings ? Check that the jumper pins are in the right place and that the cable is well connected.