[SOLVED] Restoring a corrupted HD + installing a SSD in my G4

[coca]

In a sad and unfortunate turn of events last night, my AGP PowerMac G4 stopped booting from and recognizing the OS 9 installation on my IDE hard drive. I believe it to be corrupted, and likely failing due to its age. But in the chance that the data on it can be salvaged, how would I go about doing that? The drive seems to appear in drive setup, but with the <not-supported> tag, so I can't do anything with it. I need to find a way to get around that.

Now all that being said, I will be finding an alternate storage medium to install in my G4 to minimize the risk of this happening again in the future. I've picked out a candidate (OWC Mercury Electra 3G), but I'm having trouble deciding what IDE to SATA adapter to get. It seems like there's a lot of specific factors to pay close attention to for each one, such as how they function when more than one drive is connected (though, I do plan on using only one drive), and their chipsets and such. Perhaps I'm overthinking it and just about any adapter will do, but I am a novice when it comes to this stuff, so before I make a purchase, I would like to ask for your recommendations on what adapter I should get.

UPDATE
I figured out what was wrong and you all are probably about to collectively facepalm. The hard drive is completely fine, what happened was that the cable connecting the drive to the motherboard came loose. So everything works fine now. Of course, I will absolutely still invest in a backup drive while this one is still good.

[ovalking]

You don't say what your back-up process was!

Norton Utilities Disk Doctor is one option, but in my experience, if DiskWarrior can't fix it, nothing will.

[coca]

Admittedly, I never got a backup set up for my G4. I've only had it for a couple of weeks and I've hardly done anything with it so far, since I've mainly been wrestling with a different issue on it. The computer functioned fine until last night when it suddenly stopped recognizing the HDD upon boot. So, I slacked on that front, but it's not too big of a deal to me if I have to start over from scratch. The problem there is that I have nothing reliable to install the OS onto now that the HDD is likely corrupted, which is why I'm looking at getting a SSD and SATA adapter.

Currently I'm running 9.2.2 from DVD-RAM to access Mac software functions. It's arduously slow and probably damaging to the disc, but it works and I won't be doing it for long. I'll see if I can get DiskWarrior working on it.

[IIO]

you are now warned and know how it feels when a harddrive breakes while you dont have a backup of important data.