Hard-drive cabling question.

[TteFAboB]

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.