G4 Quicksilver Problem: Hard Drives Won't Show Up.

Hello,
I have a G4 Quicksilver 800mhz that has been running fine until this morning when it froze and I could hear what sounded like one of the hard drives clicking over and over in it (it has two 40gb hard drives, one with OS 9.2 and the other with 10.4). I tried restarting it and could get nothing but a blank screen with a circle and slash through it (no folder or question mark).

I then booted from the 10.4 install CD and got to the installer. I then opened disk utility and neither of the hard drives would show up. I then began to run the installer and neither hard drive would show up there either (the clicking noise hasn't come back btw).

I tried restarting a few more times with and without booting from the CD and get the same result. That's where I'm at now. I have another G4 (466 Digital Audio upgraded to 1ghz) which I'm using now to post this. Any suggestions or advice on what could be the problem or how to proceed with troubleshooting my Quicksilver would be greatly appreciated.

Happy New Year and thanks in advance!

My suggestion would be to start up the working tower in target disk mode (hold down T key) at start up until firewire symbol displays on screen, connect a firewire cable from working tower to non working tower. Next start up non working tower holding alt/option key until you get to disk option screen and select the working towers disk and try to boot if it does then there is no problem with non working tower, problem lies in hard disk. Take notice if there are any other drives on disk option screen as well and try to start from alt/option and select one of the drives to boot from if nothing, while firewire connected and good tower running start non working tower in target disk mode and see if drives show up on desktop, if they do not, check in finder for them if still nothing, restart working computer and see if they show up, then if you can gain access to drives try disk utility and repair and verify then disconnect and restart to see if this solves your problem. Sounds like you have 2 drives in non working tower are they both bootable? Let me know if you need further assistance, and good luck.

Start with the basics, make sure all the ATA cables are firmly in

Thanks for the suggestions powermac G5 and louishen. Both hard drives in the computer are bootable and it was my thought since all of the sudden neither would show up for disk utility or the installer on the CD, there was a problem somewhere between the logic board and the cable to the hard drives. It just seemed unlikely both hard drives would go out at the same time. Thanks for your help and I'll update after trying your suggestions.

Update: Got it! I tried disconnecting one of the drives, starting up from the master only...nothing. Then unhooked it, changed the jumpers on the slave to master, hooked only it up...and sure enough it came to life! Dead hard drive was the problem. Thanks!