Feels like the more I try to understand what the problem is, the less I know. I know what should be happening... how this relatively simple thing was supposed to go, but there's really no clue I can find as to why it's not following the plan.

There's a limit imposed on drive size, but it's exclusively a result of the operating system rather than any inherent hardware limitations of the Macintosh. System 6 and 7 up to 7.5 only support partitions up to 2 GB, but will support a drive larger than 2 GB if partitioned into 2 GB sections. However, Apple's drive partitioning tools only support eight partitions per drive, so you're still looking at only 16 GB accessible.
System 7.5 increased the max size of a partition to 4 GB. System 7.5.2 later increased the maximum size to 2 TB, but only on Macs with built-in PCI slots, which would not include your Quadra.

Mac OS 8.1, which introduced HFS+ formatting, allows addressing up to 2 TB of drive space, however, 68k Macs (including your Quadra) cannot use a drive formatted as HFS+ as a boot drive. If you're interested in that kind of setup (say for a server or something), it's easy enough to partition a large drive with a <2 GB HFS-formatted boot partition, and then format the rest of it as an HFS+ data partition.

Certainly if you want to try it, though, the Mac should work with the 120 GB drive, albeit addressing only 2 GB.

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That's sort of the problem I have... no drives of the appropriate dimensions or capacity for that old of a Mac. That's why I bought the one I'm trying to use. Though the information you gave is useful, and good to know... it does me little good at this point. As I think I mentioned before, all the other old Macs I've picked up use 50-pin SCSI drives, so having another tiny IDE drive laying around will do me little good.

Do you mean that the weird jumperless drive mounts on the Quadra? If so, that means your IDE bus and cables are probably good, which is good news. If not, I'm not sure what sort of drive you're describing, and I'm not sure if it will work in the Mac. But the 120 GB is worth trying to make sure everything works in the machine.

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I was referring to another old drive I pulled from an ancient Compaq machine... a 2.5gb Quantum Bigfoot 2550AT. It's a 5.25 inch hard drive... literally too large for permanent use in the Performa. A little more research on my part helped me find out that it does, in fact, have jumpers... just ones that are too camouflaged to see at a quick glance.

It's not so much the drive bracket itself... more like the way the drives connect to the logic board... through that odd strip of greyish plastic that all the drive cables are solidly embedded into. If it had a more normal set-up (something I'm more used to dealing with), I would have just swapped out the IDE cable and would know for sure whether the cable itself is bad or not. With this setup, I can't tell if it's even POSSIBLE to change out a bad IDE cable... let alone how difficult (or simple) the task might be.

If you're using the original CD, you are probably using the "Internal HD Format" application. That's what I remember the formatting utility released with the initial IDE-based Macintoshes. As I posted on another thread, this utility is incompatible with certain drives (particularly newer ones, but perhaps also non-Apple-ROMed drives, as in your case) because it does not recognize the partitioning information the drives leave the factory with. It seems a strong possibility that you having formatted the drive in a newer machine included the partitioning information on the drive, which the Quadra's drive setup utility is unable to recognize.

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I was just using the CD to boot the machine... I had different versions of all the programs I needed to use on a separate floppy disk. It causes a bit of a hassle having to go from a Zip disk through another machine (Performa 6200) to get the tools I need onto floppies, but it's doable. If I could figure out how to get it to recognize the Zip drive, I would just access the Zip disk directly and put all the needed utilities on a bootable disk instead. Trouble is, the restore CD will only install to the internal hard drive (which it thinks doesn't exist) and nothing else.

I was all but certain that the Internal HD Format program would NOT work, though I did try it just to know for sure. I've tried Drive Setup, versions 1.5 and 1.7.3... neither one had any luck recognizing that there was a hard drive installed at all (either supported or unsupported)! I know that I will have to 'hack' them to get them to work with an unsupported drive, but I can't do that until the drive shows up as 'unsupported' in the first place.

Now, assuming that the newer machine included partitioning info on the drive that the Performa can't hande... how do I get rid of any and all partitioning info on that drive (in essence, return it to an 'uninitialzed state')? If the Performa can't read the drive, wouldn't it just tell me that it's not initialized and let me format it? (Of course, it wouldn't actually be able to format it, since it's unsupported... but wouldn't it at least try to... or just tell me that it can't read the drive because it's unsupported?)

Do you have a newer system software CD? I'd try booting the Quadra up with an 8.0 CD and formatting the drive there, using Drive Setup 1.0.3 or higher.
(The Quadra doesn't have a PowerPC upgrade card does it? That will cause problems with older versions of Drive Setup/Internal HD Format.)

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As far as I can tell, no... no upgrade cards of any sort. If it has any, I wasn't told that there were, and I can't distinguish it myself. As far as I know, it's a 'stock' setup.

Other than the restore CD that I got with the machine, I don't really have anything else from that era that will work. I have the 8.5 install CD I mentioned before, the restore CD for a Performa 6200, and a set of System 6 floppies.