System Crashes repeatedly - hard drive issue?

I've been using my G4 933MHz with 2 internal hard drives for quite some time. I started having issues with the system crashing, while the system drive made a binding or poer up/down sound repeatedly. The drives were stacked on top of one another, so I bought a new cable and separated the 2 drives so they are now side by side. I thought maybe it was happening because they were getting too hot or something. The system worked for a few weeks, but is now back to having the same problem.
I've run both the Apple Disk utility and Tech Tool Pro and neither really come up with any problems. The Apple disk utility used to have issues seeing the drives right after a crash. Now it either sees them and says no fix needed or it doesnt see either drive at all.
Tech Tool Pro used to see both drives and all tests ran successfully. Now, I pretty much get a hardware nor supprted message each time I run it. At first I thought my system drive was the problem, but now I'm not sure. The fact that neither drive shows up in the disk utility makes me wonder if there is not some bigger problem. Both drives work perfectly fine sometimes. If I boot up a few times, they eventually show up and everything works fine for about 10-15 minutes, but eventually it crashes again.
Has anyone encountered this problem before? Or have insight into what might be wrong and how I could fix it? Or are there any other tests I can run, besides the normal hard drive tests? I'd just hate to go spend the money on a new hard drive to find out that my drives are fine and it's the system itself that is the problem. Any help is greatly appreciated.
By the way, the second drive is almost identical to the drive that came with the computer. I bought it from a mac dealer and it is the same brand.
Thanks,
Wil

They're both on the same ide cable. It's been setup this way for quite some time. One drive is setup as a master, the other as a slave. Never had any problems for the past couple of years. Issue just started about a month ago. Don't recall anything that may have triggered it. Just one night when I was sitting there, the whole thing froze. Ever since then, it has been freezing sporatically. Now it's doing it about every 2 minutes from when I get it booted up...if I can even get it to boot. Most of the time it just sits on a grey screen, then goes to the blinking folder with the system face and question mark, then after about 20 seconds of that, it eventually boots into the system drive and freezes or boots to the cd. It's completely random from what I can tell, as to which happens.

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    I work on behalf of HP

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    Last week I helped a customer use MDT2010 to deploy Windows 7 to ThinkStation systems with multiple hard drives.  The customer has multiple HDDs in the system and wants Windows to be installed to the HDD that is connected to SATA port 1.  Unfortunately Windows does not always assign "Disk 0" to the HDD on SATA port 1 - in fact it is completely random what disk ID gets assigned to which SATA port.  The bug is documented by Microsoft in KB937251:
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