Can I ask how you determined the hard drive cable was faulty? I'm wondering if the HD may be faulty too .... do you have access to another HD, or access to another Mac so you could try F
irewire Target Disc Mode?
Another thing is the discs you have ... are they the original discs that shipped with the iBook G4? Installations discs are model specific and you need the exact discs for your model or a set of universal install discs.