2 Hard Drive failure questions

[BuckleDownBen]

Hi-

On IDE drives-

1) If I am looking at the drive with the pins on the left and the power connector on the right, and I break off the top, rightmost pin (I think this is the ground pin), and the drive still works, what could happen to the drive down the road.

2) If I unplug the power to a drive while the drive is on, and then the computer can't recognize the drive, what exactly has happened, and is there any way to fix it?

 

[Adul]

1) You can risk stability and possibly shorten the life of the drive. You may also induce unexplained errors.

2) You can kill the drive, replace it with a new one. (I did it before myself )

 

[Demon-Xanth]

Unplugging power while the drive is on WILL cause a head crash. Every other pin (the bottom row) on a floppy drive, IDE drive, and SCSI drive, is ground. That is how they got away with DB25 SCSI, they used the shroud as ground instead of 25 more pins.