Perfectirony,
Laptop drives to in fact have jumpers, but the OEM drive I pulled out was set to PRIMARY and I made sure to the replacement drive was set the same way (no jumpers in both cases).

SpaceBass, did you ever get the hard drive on that PPC mini working? If so, what was the fix? Second question, what hard drive did you try as the replacement?

johngpt - it'd been a while, I had to rack my memory a bit :)

I came to the conclusion that the whole IDE subsystem was dead. Apple's solution was a new logic board which, as always, was about $50 less than a new intel mini.

I ended up getting a new laptop drive (not sure which, seagate maybe) and a MadDog firewire enclosure. Since it was a small drive, and firewire, it didn't need external power, AND macs can boot from firewire drives.

So I plugged the drive into another G4, installed tiger (later Leopard) and then plugged it into the dead mini...presto...still working that way today

Thank you sir. Seagate was the brand name which I'd been trying to remember. I've read elsewhere that they've been used in ppc mini's as a replacement. I like your idea of the external enclosure.