Hard drive in Pismo not recognized; is my logic board fried?

Sorry to post another Pismo question so soon, but the Powerbook has me baffled again. Initially, the G3 laptop (actually it is a G4 as I put in the Newer upgrade long ago) had kernel panics and wouldn't boot completely even on the install disks. I tracked that down to bad memory but before I concluded that it was RAM at the source of my troubles, I thought that the problem was a bad hard drive ribbon and connector. I ordered the hard drive cage/ribbon and received it today. In the interim I have been running the Pismo via a firewire drive (and it runs fine), so I took the drive out of its firewire enclosure, put it in the cage, connected the ribbon and installed it in the computer. Flashing question mark on the screen. I removed it and made sure the ribbon was securely attached to both drive and mother board, then attempted to boot up again. Flashing question mark (which I know means no available boot drive). I started up using the install disk, ran disk utility and no drive other than the install disk showed up. I even tried the old cage and ribbon; flashing question mark.
My mind says there are only two possible causes: either the new ribbon/cage is faulty or my logic board is somehow fried, not allowing the disk attached to the ribbon to connect. Am I missing something? Right now I'm about resigned to just using it via a firewire drive, but the challenge to figure out the problem still spurs me, so I come to this great forum seeking any wisdom. Could the problem be anything else than a bad logic board (assuming the new ribbon is OK)? All help is appreciated.
Thanks, Will

Hey there. I'm trying to draw back my G3-era knowledge but it's taking me a while!
I can't remember if you can access Apple System Profiler from the 10.4 install disk, but if you can, do so with the internal hard drive connected and see what it says for the ATA section.
PowerBook G3s are wonderful computers. I still have mine around although I finally retired it from my desk a while back (it was not as my main computer of course, but usually was used for IRC or Facebook or something like that) because my mom entered the computer world when someone gave her an iMac G3 with 333 whopping MHz! I gave her the RAM modules out of my Wallstreet G3 to get her from 64 to 512 MB and imaged my drive onto hers (to keep from having to redo the lovely XPostFacto 10.4 install) and she used it for around a year, happily, before upgrading to a MacBook Pro. Now that she's not using the iMac, I could steal my RAM (and that 333 MHz CPU card, heh mine's only a 266!) back. :-P
I had one of those SCSI adaptors that turned the odd square plug (can't remember what it was called now) into a normal 25 pin. I left it connected all the time because the screen hinge had failed and it kept the screen at a usable angle. Some may call it "ghetto," but I prefer the term improvisational usage technique.
Anyway, forgive my going offtopic. Lets just hope we can get yours running again!
Regards,
-Ryan
Message was edited by: ryan42

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