Not too long ago, I purchased an older computer to serve as a file server or test box (pending on my mood). Booting up with a Linux distribution (I think it was Fedora) it reported errors with the hard drive. A casual glance made it seem that a new hard drive was in order. I was busy at the time and let it be.
Fast forward to this evening and I came back to the computer and played around with the drives. At first I thought I had forgotten everything about IDE drivers, master/slave/select options, and the master and slave position of the ribbon. Routinely the box would refuse to boot and its behavior was erratic.
At one point, enabling power to the CD-ROM drive but removing the IDE cable allowed the CD-ROM to turn on. Once I connected the IDE cable, it failed to turn on! Further investigation, involving swapping cables and playing with the BIOS, eventually led me to use only one IDE cable for the CD-ROM and hard drive that was supposedly broken. With the extra ribbon that appeared broken, I started to remove it, only to realize that it was loose!
The ribbon was well sealed behind other ribbons connecting to the board, and I couldn't tell from looking that it was unseated. But sure enough, by feel the ribbon was loose.
The computer booted up fine after some minor BIOS changes (the hard drive and CD-ROM are on the same ribbon, which isn't good but I'll fix that later). The machine ran through a series of S.M.A.R.T. tests, and the hard drive that appeared damaged is perfectly normal.
The moral of the story: always checks your cables!
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