Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2021 August 30

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August 30

IDE hard drive with broken pin

Can anyone tell me what the actual consequence is of a broken data pin on an IDE hard drive? I accidently broke one (pin 10) while trying to connect it to my laptop (thanks to a badly-designed IDE to USB connector). My laptop is claiming the HDD needs formatting - is this likely to be a result of the broken pin, or would it be an unrelated error? (The HDD is about 20 years old, from an equally old Win 98 PC, so there is a good chance that there are other faults as well). Internet searches only turn up that a broken data pin is bad, with nothing about the actual errors that would result. Iapetus (talk) 20:27, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

I am not sure you can do anything yourself. If you need to recover some data from the drive, in the present situation this will require some specialized equipment that you do not have. Ruslik_Zero 20:37, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

By the way pin 10 is one of the data pins. It is impossible to read anything from the drive without it. Ruslik_Zero 20:39, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

Find someone with good soldering skills, a steady hand, and a magnifier. It's probably going to be possible to replace the broken pin, but not easy. —scs (talk) 01:41, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

If the information is important (and I assume it is, since a 20 years old HDD is as hardware a piece of garbage), then avoid 'do it yourselfers' or hobbysts. Go to a professional before messing with it, unless you are just curious. --Bumptump (talk) 19:49, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

Easiest and common way in this case would be find the (exact, check serial number) same drive on ebay or elsewhere and exchange the drive's controller (exemplary). --84.190.194.22 (talk) 11:20, 1 September 2021 (UTC)