G3 Macs and blinking question mark

John VanCleaf writes that "We, at Rutgers University Publications, purchased 15 G3 Power Macs. During the first month since purchase, we lost the drives on 6 of the G3s." The symptom is that the computer freezes; then the blinking question mark appears on restart. Reinitializing the drive appears to fix the problem, except that one of the reinitialized drives has now had this happen a second time.

John adds: "A person at Apple Tech Support said they were getting a lot of the same from other callers and that Apple was working on it but at this time wasn't sure why this problem was happening." Still, as we have not gotten other reports like this here at MacFixIt, we would hesitate to conclude that this is a widespread problem.

Update: Not sure whether these have a direct bearing on the problem cited, but:

Jim Bell points out that Apple's recently released Network Assistant 3.0.2 "fixes a potential problem of some user workstation hard disks being erased when communication errors occur when administrators copy and replace files using Network Assistant 3.0 and 3.0.1."

John Schmid queries whether the problem is related to the apparent Mac OS 8.1 problem that was associated originally with Norton AntiVirus (as previously reported here).