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First of all, since this is not a Linux-specific problem I'm not sure this is the right place for this post.
Anyway, for the past few years I've been using a 250GB IDE hard drive mostly to store backups on. For quite a while it worked fine, but when plugged in again after being removed so I could clean out the dust in my PC it didn't work quite right anymore. It caused the system to hang and gave error messages remniscent of those detailed on this page. After some fiddling it worked OK for a while, and then one day it randomly did this again. I took the ribbon cable out, then the hard drive, and realized one of the pins was pushed in (at the time I thought it was broken). After some reading I decided to sacrifice a ribbon cable. What I did was yank a pin off of an old DVD drive that doesn't work and shoved it in the cable where the short pin was. I made sure it was seated well, plugged in in, and hoped for the best. To my delight it worked without a hitch for maybe a year or more.
And then a little more than a month ago we had lightning strike a power line outside of our house and it fried my motherboard. I now have a replacement board, but after all of the taking apart and moving around and stuff, the hard drive is back to its old antics. The pin-in-the-cable trick wasn't working anymore. After I realized that the pin wasn't broken half-way but rather pushed in, I grabbed some needlenose pliers and pulled it out. It now will plug into any ribbon cable just fine and the computer recognizes it, but it's slow at POST and hangs the system when booting the OS, whether it be Linux or Windows. Knoppix CDs boot just fine, although slower. S.M.A.R.T. sees no problems.
Basically I'm wondering 2 things. First of all, is there anything I can do to get around the hangs? And second, I'm considering buying an external hard drive enclosure for regular 3.5 inch hard drives and using it as an external USB drive. Since the drive does still work and I can add/remove stuff while booted in Knoppix, and the main issue seems to be my system hanging, I figure, maybe, I can just plug in the drive when I need it after the computer is already booted up and it will work fine. Does this sound like a reasonable expectation?
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