G4 Hard drive troubles

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I've got a G4 800 that I'm trying to add a few sata drives to. I've got three drives from Imacs that have gone down and I want to put them in the G4 for extra storage. My problem is that the drives show up if I put them on the main ata/ide ribbon,via sata/ide adapters,in the master slot. They have no jumpers. If I put them on another ribbon and put that to a PCI card, the computer wants to initialize them and then Disk Utility hangs for hours at "Creating Partition Map". I put them back on the master slot on the main ribbon they show up fine. The PCI ata/ide card is recognized by system profiler and the computer sees the drives, just not as formatted drives. Do I need to get a PCI Sata card? Will it do me any good to spend that money or will it do the same. Is there something wrong with my existing PCI card that makes it recognizable to System Profiler but makes the drives non-compatible. I have an ide drive that is the start up drive, jumpered to start up on the second slot on the main ribbon and that works fine, but none of the sata drives works in that position because of no master/slave jumpers on the sata drives. I've got the ide startup drive out and starting up with a Cube set as a start up drive in "Target Disk Mode" so I can move the drives around. If I put an sata drive on the main ribbon at master and put the ide startup drive in the slave spot both the drives show up, but my DVD drive is set up to be the master on that ribbon so I need that slot for the DVD. I can even startup with the sata drive in master, the ide drive as slave and the start up drive, and the cube drive shows up as an extra drive. I know I'm rambling, so I guess what I really need to know is if I can get these sata drives working on the pci/ide card or do I need to go a different route (sata pci card,external sata to usb/firewire enclosure) or what? Sorry to be so long winded. Thanks for any help.
 
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G'day and welcome to the forums.

Having gone this way with a FW800 MDD some years ago, as a suggestion do not waste your money if it is not too late. An investment in a Raptor 10,000RPM drive is the easier, and faster, path to go.
 
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Well, I haven't bought too much, just a couple of adapters and some IDE ribbons. I had the drives, just trying to use them. I've actually gotten the drives recognized now on the PCI card, but just one at a time. If I put two on the ribbon, neither are recognized. If I put one on by itself in the end connection (master?), it's not recognized. I've have to put them on the second (slave?) connection and only one at a time( the PCI card has places for two ribbons) for them to show up at all. I think I'll try a multi-disk enclosure if I can find one cheap enough.
 

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