Graphite slot-loading G3 iMac drive failure

Hi. My G3 Graphite slot-loading iMac hard drive died this past week, or at least I thing it did. It has the original hard drive in it and is at least 10 years old,maybe more. It is a 60g drive with 2 partitions: 50g for OS X and 10g for OS 9.2. Now I hardly ever use the OS 9.2 partition, but I just never got rid of it.
It's the OS X partition that failed. I was working on it this past Saturday and I notice it was acting strange and slow. It froze on me twice and I was force to shut it down both times by pressing the white glowing on button on the front. Well, after that second restart is when the trouble started. I heard the start-up chime and that was it, just a gray screen for a long time, then the question mark and then, after several minutes, it booted into OS 9.2.
The OS X partition was completely unavailable. The only way I was able to see it was to boot the G3 in target disc mode and attached it thru firewire to my G4 iMac. In Disk Utility, the OS X partition came up as an unmounted drive. Disk Utility could not verify or fixed it. So I tried Disk Warrior 4. Disk Warrior was unable to fix it. So I purchased Prosoft Data Rescue ll and a new internal hard drive.
Data Rescue ll was able to recover all my files, but with some errors. So, I went and purchased a hard drive enclosure, put the internal hard drive in it, had Data Rescue II clone the entire G3 hd, and then had Data Rescue recover from the clone, with the same results. Prosoft support decipher the error messages to be reporting that some data was missing. Still waiting to hear from them exactly what that means.
Now I wrote all that to get to this question: If a partition fails on a single hd, does that mean the whole drive is bad? I thought that when you drive fails, you would not be able to see any of the partitions on it. Obviously, I'm going to replace it with the new internal drive that is currently serving as my clone drive. But, I was just wondering how this drive failed. I was going to try and see if I can reinitialized it and if so, reinstall OS X and see what happens. Or do you thing that is a waste of time? As i write this,the G3 is running in target disc mode and the drive sounds fine, not making any noise what so ever. I was wondering if this is an actual drive failure or somehow, when I rebooted the system folder got so damaged that it put the partition in the state it is currently in.
I'd like to know becuase, if I can just reinstall OS 10.4 and have access to that partition, I could back-up all my files that way and possibly have no missing data.
So any insights would be greatly appreciated!

Is the OS X partition installed at the beginning of the hard drive? If so, that's the area of the platter(s) that has seen the most usage over the years, so it may have developed surface damage, affecting the reliability of reads and writes. This wouldn't necessarily cause a difference in operational noise coming from the drive. One partition may continue functioning normally, while the other one occupying a bad area of the drive continues to have errors. The problem with copying files from a quirky drive is that you can likely duplicate the same corrupted files as were found on the original. If time is of no consequence, you could erase that partition and install Tiger again, but I'd use the original installer disk and not clone from the problematic partition. I had a 40 GB drive in a beige G3 that would cause unexpected system hangs. Because Drive Setup's Test Disk function and NDD's Media Scan would hang after a few minutes into the process, I estimated the problem area to be within the first 2 GBs of the drive. My solution was to create (3) partitions, with the first one set to 2 GBs, and the second and third partitions equally dividing the remaining drive capacity. With Drive Setup, I de-selected the "Mount on Startup" option for partition 1, so it disappeared from the desktop. I installed the OS on the second partition and designated the third for file storage. With that partition configuration, the G3 never had the unexpected system hangs that had plagued it previously.

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I have seen "PAV" in the discussion forums, does that refer to the small power >supply board coupled to the main logic board, on the same plane?
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ChezRusso wrote:
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Optical Drive/slot loading drive not recognized by imac G5. HELP

We have an imac G5 that is maybe 14 months old. I know for a fact that the slot loading optical drive on the side has been used for three things in the entire time we've owned it. That's THREE TIMES in 14 months and now it's as if the drive doesn't exist on the computer. I've gone into the system profiler, it says there is no drive, try to put in a cd, no resistance, no noise and it doesn't even try to suck in any disc. Has anyone else experienced this? Have you figured out what to do? I can replace the drive myself, it's not hard but can someone recommend a good quality drive cause I'm not paying through the nose for parts from apple.
I feel ripped off!

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Safari problems on iMac G3 slot-loading CRT

I'm posting here because I haven't been able to get a satisfactory solution to the problem on the Safari discussion board. Here goes.
I recently upgraded my son's iMac DV (A G3 processor) to OS X 10.3.9. Was having trouble launching Safari 1.3. It would start to launch and then quit. Here's the chain of events of fixes I've tried:
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Jamie,
Not being sure of what was suggested in the Safari forums....a few questions.....
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littleshoulders [:-)

Graphite slot-loading G3 iMac drive failure

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