Oops

[mashedpotatoes]

I only recently realised my hard drive was limited to 33mb/s because I was using the old style IDE cables. While replacing them one of the pins got pushed back through the connector and detached itself from the solder on the other side I've lost a pin before on a hard drive years ago and that continued working fine so I pressed on, with fingers crossed, but nope no windows boot. ohcrap.

I don't have a soldering iron so i've just wedged a tiny bit of metal I broke off the top of a disposable lighter in between the gap to make contact... and success, it's booted! HDtune is reporting ok'ish. The first run had a load of points where it dipped to under 5mb/s, but 5 more runs has put it around 20 mb/s min and 60 mb/s max, about where i'd expect for this HD.

Now, how safe am I to leave it like that for a while? I'm getting new sata drives soon hopefully anyway...

 

[DanNeely]

A kludge like that could blow up at any time. Start making backups now.

 

[mashedpotatoes]

I've been burned by a hard disk failure before so yeah everything important is duplicated across my 2 HD's, mainly my music collection.

When you say blow up, just dramatic wording I hope? I'd presumed it would just short the HD at the most... or am I totally wrong?

And to clarify, the gap isn't even a millimetre really, I'd managed to bend the pin back to nearly making contact but not enough, that's where I thought about the tiny bit of metal to make contact. It's pretty firmly wedged under the pin and not touching any other pins.

 

[DanNeely]

mainly hyperbole. If your loose wire patch slips loose it could short something, but I don't know of the ribbon cable carries enough power to inflict permant damage on your mobo or a 2nd drive attached to the cable. Unless someone else can confirm that you're not risking anything beyond data corruption (your fix is probably putting alot of noise into the signal) I wouldn't want that drive in anything except a klunker box for data recovery.