Matt, BTDT... Had an old Mac Centris 650 (one of the old 68040 machines) with a 230MB hard drive. Was chatting on AOL Instant Messenger. Sometime during my online session, AIM crashed, and froze the computer. Nothing would work. So, I did the three-finger salute, and rebooted it. Got the floppy disk icon with the flashing "?". Tried rebooting again. Still no dice. Zapped the PRAM, did everything I could. I could hear the drive spin up, but it wouldn't boot. So, popped in the Disk Tools floppy. Computer booted up. Couldn't find the hard drive, except in Drive Setup. Drive was shown as being unformatted. So, nuked, and repaved. Had to restore everything with what I had from three years prior.

The drive crashed a second time, about two months later. Popped it in an older Mac IIci that I still owned. That machine booted the drive just fine. Reinstalled it in the 650. Worked fine. Wish I had known about that the first time around. Anyway, I have three drives in my G3, one with 10.4.10, and two with 9.2.2 on them. Also run DiskWarrior whenever the computer gets unstable, so I don't wind up having the boot blocks on the drive get nuked again. I've also stopped using AOL Instant Messenger. Just don't trust it anymore.

-J