I think I toasted one of my hard drives

[Tan DJ]

About a year ago, my PSU failed, and I purchased a replacement, higher wattage PSU. The trouble I had then was that the new PSU didn't have enough plugs to be able to power both my floppy drive and my video card, so I removed one of the plugs from my old power supply, pulled apart a couple of connectors, joined up the wires, and shoved the joined wires back inside one of the plastic connectors to hold them and protect them from shorting out.

My intention was that I would never use that plug, ever, as it was just to hold the bare wires attaching the extra plug needed for my video card.

Now just recently, I purchased a "new" case as my old case had no spare drive slots. I had no problems transfering the contents from my old case into the new case, BUT I had totally forgotten that a year ago, I had added the additional plug and that one of the plugs was not a real plug, and I plugged the "joiner" plug into one of my hard drives. It plugged in well enough that I didn't notice my error at the time. I then powered up my system and noticed that my RAID controller was only seeing 1 hard drive. It was then that I noticed that the red and yellow cables were reversed compared with my other hard drive. So I shut down my system, looked at the plug and realised my mistake.

I then plugged in one of the real plugs, but I could not get any response from the drive.

I have swapped the red an yellow cables around so that it can't happen again.

Is there anything I can do to fix my hard drive? or will I just have to add my story to the "Whats the craziest/dumbest thing you've done or had happen to your PC?" thread, and go and buy me a new hard drive?

Lucky for me I was running Mirrored disks.

Regards,

Tan DJ

[ex_reven]

Do you hear the drive spin up on boot?

[Tan DJ]

No, but it is a sony SP8004N which runs quietly, plus the new case has 2 fans, and the CPU has a fan and the Video card has a fan so it is hard to hear anything else.

I felt the drive while powering on, and I thought I could feel a slight vibration, but that may have been from the other drive which is a SP0802N also very quiet, but operating.

[ex_reven]

trying the drive in another system would pretty much confirm that its toast.
http://www.fonerbooks.com/images/ide_hard.gif

[Tan DJ]

I'll try plugging it directly into the MOBO IDE controller and see if I can see it in bios

[Tan DJ]

:cry::cry::cry:

I just tried connecting the hard drive to the onboard IDE controller, rebooted and entered the BIOS, re-enabled the primary IDE interface, re-started again, pressed the "Del" key to enter the BIOS, and it just sat there doing nothing. My patience only lasted about a minute, so I switched off, and unplugged the drive, turned back on, and pressing the "Del" key took me straight into BIOS without any delay.

Should I try waiting longer to see if it will time out and eventually get to the BIOS screen? If so, how long should I wait? Or was my 1 minute wait 1 minute of silence for my dead drive?

Cheers,

Tan DJ

[Wile E]

It sounds as tho it's dead. Sorry m8. :(

[Tan DJ]

:ohwell:

I bought a second hand case off e-bay for 5 bucks, and it's gonna end up costing me 100 to replace the drive I toasted.

I suppose it could be worse. I could have purchased a new case for 100 bucks and I'd probably have made the same mistake and still had to dish out the extra 100