Hard-drive cabling question.
 

Greetings, mighty geeks,

I have a slave hard drive on a PC I don't want people fiddling with. I cannot remove it from the PC and store it yet as I am waiting for an external USB adapter thingie to arrive, and I really have no decent place to store it right now other than in the PC case itself.

Unfortunately it's an IDE, and the IDE cable is impossibe to reach without removing the screws and pulling the HDD out. So to save me the trouble of unscrewing and screwing it back on, I had a brilliant idea: I can reach for the power cable easily, how about I just disconnect the power cable and leave the IDE cable attached?

Can I do this? Will it destroy or damage the HDD or put data at risk? Will it glitch the booting of the PC? Perfect safety is only a few screws away, I know, but hey, it takes even less time to read your reply, unless you're Skybird.

Subman and his vast cabling knowledge might say otherwise, but I've never ran into problems with an IDE cable situation like this.

EDIT:Can you post a picture of your case? This sounds like the case from hell as all of the cabling should be within reach w/o that much trouble. I might suggest getting rounded cabling also if your case is that much of a headache.

Depends how tight the HD power is in the hard drive. SOme are near impossible to get out with the cable out anyway. Some and easy and remove easy. If you're paranoid - do it the right way.

-S

PS. Oops - I see what you are trying to do. Remove the IDE cable too by the way, otherwise your system may wait forever trying to read from it.

I know you are doing this with a regular HDD ATA, but if you ever get a system that has SATA ... do not plug/unplug the SATA cable form the HDD or the motherboard with the power cord in ...

All kinds of strange things happen to the power supply ... I was in a hurry and by passed that simple safety rule last year.

The slave HDD is stuck between the top of the case and the CD/DVD drives. Since the drives are longer than the HDD, the little thing doesn't stick out like it should when you install it where it's supposed to be.

Damn it then, seems I'll have to unscrew the damn thing.

Knowing this, I'd imagine hooking up the IDE's were probably a pain. How do you have it configured?:hmm::hmm:

IDE-1
Master-main HDD
Slave-cd/rom

IDE-2
Master-slave HDD
Slave-dvd

It's best to pull both cables from the drive.

Actually, the master is a SATA. :doh: And there's an empty removable HDD tray at the top slot I didn't even mention: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/op/formTrays-c.html

So I think one IDE has the tray and the slave HDD, and the other has the DVD/Cds, if that works, I don't really know. :dead: