Hi all,

I recently killed a hard drive by nudging the sata cable while it was running the OS. I noticed immediately that the OS had crashed when I was fiddling around by the PC and nudged the cable. Before that it was good as gold.

I checked and the cable hadnt come out of the socket. Nonetheless clicking ensued on next boot, booting then failed, and now the main partition takes 10 minutes to be recognised from within another installation, and then it cant be navigated. The boot sector partition seems to be fine though. I havent tried with data rescue software yet. I had the PC in SATA mode.

So my question is - I am wondering if I should avoid using this port/power supply now or is this not likely a cause. Is this normal if you nudge a sata cable? I thought drives were hot swappable with sata mode?

Cheers for any advice.

320 GB WD15EVDS-68V9B0
XP Pro 32bit
Sabertooth x58
Xilence 700W PSU
I7 930

U must Recover and rescue your data then fill zero and erase you HDD. then with some chance everything will be OK. Test and Post.

No.

Dont run any utility or programs on the drive, as you said you heard clicking noise, and the partition is taking a long time to access.

If your data is important and not worth taking the risk, take DR help, it wont cost much in your case.

Else , if you know the risks of DIY, your should try to image your disk to another disk using tools that manages bad sectors (like ddrescue) and then run recovery tools on the imaged drive, not on the original drive.

There are chances that the drive may totally fail in the process of imaging, and make recovery difficult and costly.

Not much data on there. Just tonnes of software. Initially I did get back into the drive for long enough to copy the important files I could find.

Above all I was curious about the hotswapping thing, and was wondering if someone could confirm its common to kill a drive by moving the cable, but without it coming out. I wouldnt want to put any more drives there if theres any possibility of it being a power supply problem or cable / port problem. I am a little surprised that they dont make the sata cable connection a little more secure if wiggling it can cause such damage! Some of the cables I have are the locking type , but some are easy to slide off and jiggle around.

If I find I am missing files I will image the drive or send for repairs and repost. Thanks for the replies.

Honestly, there is no reason (except failure) for a drive to behave that way. I hotswap continuously SATA drives and nothing ever happened (data cables, for power I prefer to stay safe and do a cold start - preferably).

Better to diagnose the drive completely before assuming there is a catastrophic failure.

I ran western digital diagnostic and it failed straight away. Im not sure there was an error code. ill run it again.

So, what kind of drives / configuration is it safe to hot swap? If it has sata, newer drives only?

Sata does support host swap many servers have this but they are in caddy's to control the insertion angle etc each connector has ground pins that make contact "first" then the data and power make connection it has to be "exact" to avoid what happened when you did it "manually" More info is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

Must have lifted one of the pins off when i moved it.

Thanks for the replies.