Has this ever happened to you?!?!

[DaiShan]

Well the other night I was changing my CDRW from secondary master to Primary Slave so I could make a copy of a cd on the fly (cd-rom to cd-rw no steps in between) anyways I swapped, made the cd, and moved everything back to its original channel. Anyways I must not have connected my ATA 100 cable securelly to my 45 gig Maxtor because I was getting that clunking noise associated with a bad connection, and I was having a hard time opening files, transfering files etc, so I decided to switch connectors on the cable (move the drive from the middle connector to the last connector) I grabbed the connector by the tabs on each side and started to pull it out, half way through pulling it out of the drive the tabs on the connector broke off, and since I was still pulling, and the tabs were connected to the cable, not the connector anymore I ended up ripping the connector completely off my cable! Now the connector is stuck on my HDD, and this cable is screwed up. This was a brand new cable that came with my 2 week old Epox 8KHA+ I have another ATA 100 cable that I am gonna swap with, and I am just going to use a pair of needle nose pliers to pull this connector off, but I was wondering if this had ever happened to anyone else? Mind you I wasn't pulling on the cable itself, from the connector, I don't want to hear if you ripped your cable because you always pull from the ribbon 🙂

 

[cholley]

yup, done that one a few times
i have in a pinch repaired it as well by clamping the connector back on the ribbon cable and a drop of super glue.
just need to make sure is't nice and square but if you eyeball it long enough you can see it can be done with little trouble

 

[Gaunt]

A clunking sound is associated with a bad connection?

Recently I replaced the motherboard on my server and since then the HD has had problems. Just after I replaced the motherboard, the HD ran for about 2 weeks without any problems. Then it ran for 3 days, then 2 days, then 1 day... each time it would lock and I would have to power it off before it would detect the HD again. At the end it started to make a terrible clunking sound. Sometimes it would run fine for a couple hours, after turning it on and off a couple times to get it to boot without making the sound. I was able to save the data, and moved the drive to another machine to clean it properly before returning it. After I had moved the drive, I had no problems with it... no clunking, no crashing, nothing, except maxtor's diagnostic tools report a problem when trying to low level format.

I am wondering now if it was a connection that caused the problem originally. Would a bad connection and the clunking damage the drive physically? Is the drive damaged at all.... there's 12k of bad sectors on it since this happened, and as I mentioned, there's an error that comes up in the diagnostic tools as soon as I select low level format (which is the suggested course of action on maxtor's site).

Any ideas? Sorry for being a little off topic for this post. 🙂

Edit:

And yes, I have had the ide connector come apart and half of it stay stuck in the drive. Major pain in the but. 🙂

 

[DaiShan]

Not a clicking sound, and it would not cause physical damage to the drive (I don't think) In your case I think the drive was just dying. This is the sound that I was hearing was the same one I heard after I put a laptop drive in a usb drive reader, and the connection was loose.

 

[mastertech01]

Its happened to me with SCSI cables.. dem suckas arent cheap either. Seems like some drives need the Jaws Of Life to remove the cables

 

[DaiShan]

Yeah, the cable I just put on there was stiff going in too. I could understand if I was pulling from the cable, but I would have never thought the connector would come apart on me like that. Oh, I would hate to lose a SCSI cable.