So the 2 GB IDE drive in my Power Macintosh 5500 seems to be dying.

The only way to get it initialized is when starting up, where a "This disk is not readable by this Macintosh" message appears, and initializing it that way doesn't work everytime. Disk Utility can only initialize it once in a blue moon.

It also has a habit of dismounting during the OS 8.1 disk check and I've NEVER been able to install a working system on it.

Am I right with my assumption? :'(