I have a blinking ? mark on my G4 system. Was running system 9.2 fine. When I start up with System CD, It doesn't recognize the HD. I even connected up with a blank HD and it cannot recognize that. It boots from the CD fine, but when I try to install the software, It does not recognize the HD, it says unrecognized format on that ID.

Anything happen recently that might have caused it? Was the "unrecognised format" message with the original or new/blank hard disk? p

I had the same problem about twelve hours ago! Here's what I did. 1:Turned off mac. 2:Placed my os x cd in the drive(using the manual eject on my ibook). 2:Held down the "c"key while booting. 3:chose to install without nuking the contents of my hard drive. 4:rebooted and all was fine (except for my Itunes. 5:changed start up disk to os 9.2 6:rebooted with os 9 install cd 7:Ran disk repair untill all was fixed. (found in the utillities folder on os 9 cd) 8:Ran disk repair again to make sure!!!!! 9:rebooted 10:Changed my startup disk back to os 10.1.4

do you have any scsi devices? if you do try disconnecting them