I have a bunch of hard drives from old PCs that I’ve kept around since I’m a pack rat. I really should just burn what I need to keep onto DVD and recycle of all these tiny-by-today’s-standards 10-40GB hard drives. It’s amazing to think of how much more data you can cram into the same physical drive now a days — a few weeks ago I loaded 4-750 GB drives in our NAS at work. Even my dinky USB thumb drive can hold 4GB. Anybody remember 5.25″ floppies (I was a bit too young to experience the 8″ floppies)? +10,000 points if you had colored floppies, even.

Anyways, I had an old 40GB 7200RPM IBM 75GXP Deskstar , which later came to be known as the IBM 75GXP Deathstar due to their high failure rates. I somehow lucked out and didn’t have one fail on me when it was the primary drive in my PC at the time. Fast forward to the present, and I hooked up the drive to an external USB enclosure to try and find a Word doc that I couldn’t locate elsewhere. The drive spun up but wouldn’t mount in XP. I thought great, it turned into a Deathstar.

I spent hours trying a bunch of different things to get the drive to mount, but no luck. I finally googled around and came across some eBay pages where people were selling the logic board to this drive. Ok, so replacing the logic board was an option. Awesome.

I flipped the drive upside down and took a look at how hard it would be to swap out logic boards. It was then that I noticed that one of the solders connecting the the IDE pins to the logic board was bad & wasn’t making a solid connection. I hooked the drive back up to the enclosure and pressed down on the loose pin (actually the entire row of pins) with the edge of a credit card, and lo and behold the drive mounted. Even better, I was able to find what I was looking for on that drive. :)