"NO Symbol" on startup after Apple icon; had just ran an auto Mac Update-

Question

Hi! Okay, I'm freaking out. I have a late model G4, mirrored 2003 model. A Maxtor master drive taken out from my first gen G4 as my boot drive is installed, along with two slave drives internally. Yesterday, I was getting my freelance work loaded up when .Mac Update alerted me, and I clicked "yeah, go ahead." I went about my biz in the house; my screensaver went on. Long story short, I couldn't get the computer screen back on, to show me my login window, so I rebooted. That's when I freaked out. (all that was running at the time was Mail, Safari, Firefox and the updater asking to restart… maybe the OLD AOL app, I'm not sure.)
Everything looked fine on startup until the nice grey apple turned into a NO symbol. After a few retries, I held down the option key to see what I'd get. I was offered my HD, but again I got the NO symbol. I then booted from TTP's eDrive. I didn't even see my HD to repair it. I then booted from Drive Genius No go. I tried Disk Warrior and got the same thing. (and no, booting from the OS X DVD did nothing; it saw nothing and Disk Utility saw nothing) Usually when I "lose" a drive, I can save my @ss. I'm having a coronary because I can't even see the drive with all these utils. I don't understand why I DO see it on the "option key" bootup. I'm not at all good with OS X, which is a big disappointment to me since I was able to fix anything prior… software and hardware. I have A LOT of stuff on this hard drive that won't boot up, and I'm freaking out, to put it lightly. I don't hear a hardware problem, though. It spins up, and I don't hear anything odd. I definitely do not hear a head crash. There's no clicks of death. Something else is going on that I'm just not able to figure out since I've fallen behind in my geekery since having a baby. (I will let him know of this one day. haha)
HELP. I'm broke, and I'm literally freaking out. I'm posting this from my CUBE and original cinema screen system. A lot of my work is on one of the internals, and safe, but a huge amount of stuff is on my main drive and I'm just ready to commit myself or smash the G4 into 6 million pieces. Could it be the G4 and not the HD? Like I said, I see the drive as an option when I boot the mac holding down the option key: it says "spookie's macintosh HD OSX" — my main drive. I am BAFFLED. I don't understand why NOTHING sees the drive when I try to access it.
help. please.

Answer 1

The routine that shows the screen with an Icon for each bootable drive is the Startup Manager. It lives in your Mac's ROM, and when it shows an Icon for a drive, that tells you the drive answers and appears (after a very cursory check) to contain evidence of a System. The Icons for Mac OS X or Mac OS 9 are displayed as appropriate. Later in the boot up sequence, your Mac is finding problems that give you the prohibitory sign.
You appear to have carried in a System on a drive from an older Mac, that may not contain all the drivers needed for the specific Hardware in a Mirrored Drive Doors model -- especially if the Install on it came from a Mac-specific CD originally.
I suggest you try your "Full Retail" black with silver-white X Install CD again, (after you have reset the PRAM, as you reported) to see if it can now see your Hard drive. If you are not using a full retail CD/DVD, that may be the reason your drive is not seen. The gray CD from a different Mac will not contain the drivers needed for the ATA/100 Bus connectors (the rear drive pair). You MAY be able to have the drive recognized in the ATA/66 Bus (front connectors) as that Hardware is essentially the same as in many older G4 Macs.