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Cable backwards = fried laptop HD?

W

Woblin_Goblin

2[H]4U
Joined
Jun 6, 2000
Messages
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I was going to copy the contents of a 2.5 inch laptop hard drive to a regular PC hard drive today at work using partition magic. I was using a adaptor that allows it to be connected to 80 pin EIDE cable. I've done it many times before as imaging PCs is part of my job. Normally I use a image machine to copy the images but in this case it was going very slow so I thought I'd try it using my PC. I've done it before and never had a problem.

I was fiddling around and suspected that my adaptor was bad or had a lose connection. It was working earlier in the day. Long story short, when I powered on the PC a tiny puff of smoke came out of the drive. It's toast, doesn't work at all anymore. Sucks, since I'll have to rebuild the image. Oh well.

I didn't think to check if I had it backwards until now. I know I paid attention to the pin orientation when I connected it but I guess I may have screwed up. Will plugging in a laptop hard drive backwards fry the HD?

I'm thinking about trying it out on a old HD. I hate it when I screw up :(
 
As a rule, once you let the smoke out, your done.
 
obviously the problem was that you connected an 80 pin cable to a 40 pin HDD :p

jk

Im suprised it wasnt keyed, if it was possible to connect it backwards
that certainly would fry the circuit board
 
Not completely positive, but I would guess yes, since a laptop HDDs power is also transferred on that same cable. What you saw was probably the result of the data lines seeing the mains power instead of data.
 
Speaking from experience, yes. I work as a technician at Best Buy (which will likely get me chastised, but it's a job). Because of the configuration of a laptop hard drive, the power is given through pins on the IDE cable, if this is reversed, power goes where it isn't supposed to. This will instantly destory any and all electronics on the board. The reason that they are not keyed is because of the small form factor of the device, and the fact that it has been the standard for such a long period of time, there is no real easy way to enclose the connector, or at least that is my speculation on the issue.

If you are willing to spend a fair amount of money, give what you posted to a data recovery service, they maybe able to grab the data off if it is that important to you.

"Funny" side note to this, my Genius coworker wasn't paying attention, and did just what you did, smoked a customers 80gb hdd, and all the pictures that he had on it. :(. It's only funny because he was a jerk and never did work. He got what was comming.
 
I did the backup like you and i'm always very careful with this, especially when my adapter has also the yellow/black wires connected to a molex.

I think the circuit board is gone but probably not the data. If you have another HDD of the same make/model, try to swap the board to salvage the contents.
 
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