Well, the other day i was pulling a 80 gig harddrive from an older PC to put into my current one. I've connected every kind of hardware, so it was nothing special, until i pulled out the IDE cable, and to my horror 3 pins from the hard-drive completely pulled out. From what i can gather they were pins 1, 2, and 18. I had hoped maybe that they were not vital, so i plugged up the harddrive anyways. And some strange behavior occurred. When i set the jumpers to master, the PC simply sits attempting to detect the master drive. Waited for about 5 minutes, and it was still detecting, so i figured i would see if it worked in slave. Changed the jumpers, hooked it up. And it detected the harddrive, sort of. It was detected as something like 0|5|à|à|à|à|à|à|à|à| and trailed off of the screen, so obviously that want right either. Does the same thing with cable select. After it detects it as the slave, it sits there there again, not able to continue with the POST. I've read around and seen that replacing the pins "might" be possible. I don't even know if the hd is dead or not, worked the last time i used it. I still have 2 of the pins, and the pins are still attached to the bit of metal that (used to be) soldered to the board on the harddrive. Thanks in advance!
well acording to this pin out layout: pin 1 a missing is not much of a problem because pin 1 is only used to reset the HDD when you press the reset button on your case, so, never use the reset button, always power off & power back on if pin 1 is missing pin 2 also a missing is not much of a problem as pin 2 only provides an eletrical ground (earth) & as you can see there are many ground connections provided because HDD manufacturers provie many ground connection in case some brake off pin 18 missing is a problem, as pin 18 is used during data transfer & obviously HDD recognition, however, you may be able to fix it with something similar like a needle, but, it may need to be soldered to the HDD, don't worry soldering is easy, just practice on an old cicuit board first np
