Using Sata HDD with partially dislodged connector

thejamppa · Post by **thejamppa** » Sun Mar 14, 2010 10:08 am

Hi all!

I had today one of those freak accidents I can only blame myself. In Short of it. CCFL inverted on came loose and dislodged my HDD without my noticing. I got some unable of read data sectors in Windows on diagnose tools.

How bad my situation can be? Has the partially dislodged sata cable caused permanent damage for my HDD or just corrupt the data which I could fix by installing Windows' again?

When it was dislodged HDD made weird noise like small puffing sounds like something would let some air lose and spinned down on regular basis. Now with cables securely attached again it works normally I guess and sound is normal again without odd sounds at all.

Or should I be getting another HDD? Now things seem to work pretty well.

washu · Post by **washu** » Sun Mar 14, 2010 12:48 pm

It's doubtful that any actual damage or even corrupt data has occurred on your drive from just a dislodged cable. SATA is fully check-summed so bad data on the cable should have been rejected by the drive and not written. It's however possible that something that Windows needed to write got rejected and thus you will need to correct.

If you are worried do a full scan of your drive using the manufacturer's tool. If you are going to re-install anyway do a full write zero test too.

lm · Post by lm » Sun Mar 14, 2010 1:35 pm

SATA is designed for hotplug. If there's no visible physical damage (did the circuit board or the connector get hit hard?) then there should be no problem.

thejamppa · Post by **thejamppa** » Mon Mar 15, 2010 1:22 am

Initially before spotting trouble: My system hanged in games and everything were very slow prior system crashed in BSoD and XP couldn't start but crashed BSoD everytime. After re-plugging and defragging XP partition from Win 7 and Vice Versa, things seem to work... Windows Defraction tool did said there were unredable sections and data from them has been relocated and then they were fixed.

It seems its true. Windows files were "corrupted" but repairable and now everything works again. I think DualBoot saved me this time as XP partition had bad problems in boot section. However they were fixed in Windows 7 and XP runs well again.

What I can tell is that <- 80 Gram CCFL inverted hit the cable dislodging the connector partially but did not hot actual connector. No sign of damage in connector, pins or PCB.

lm · Post by lm » Mon Mar 15, 2010 10:08 am

I disconnect and reconnect SATA cables on a running system all the time, as my stuff unfortunately happens to be on several hard drives that are just in a bunch next to my system (it's all supposed to be temporary) and I've no problems with data.

btw, I think you are speaking of an inverter, inverted is a state not a thing.