It was my understanding that having a non-Apple ROM drive meant that standard Apple utilities would not be able to format it. Hacking and/or patching those utilities are supposed to allow it to format 'unsupported' drives. Problem is that my drive isn't showing up at all... at the least, when I try to format it, it should at least show up as 'unsupported' (which it isn't).
EDIT:
Ok, after having tried a perfectly working drive in it... I get the same exact result. It acts as if there isn't even a hard drive on the IDE bus. SCSI Probe doesn't see it... Drive Setup doesn't see it... the drive itself spins up normally, but nothing sees it.
However, Drive Setup did show the external SCSI Zip drive I had attached as an 'unsupported' SCSI device with an id of 5 (which is what it should see, since the restore disk doesn't include the proper Zip drive extension). SCSI Probe saw the Zip drive, and readily identified it as such (which is good to know for future reference).
Unless somebody can think of something else I've missed (or something else I could/should try), I'm ready to call it... [xx(] ]'> The IDE cable and/or bus is dead on this one. A shame, really, since I had some high hopes for this machine.
I'll have to see if there are any parts I can use from this one for any of the other old Macs I have... soon as I can lay my fingers on at least one suitable 50-pin SCSI drive, one that doesn't cost me an arm and a leg!