this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
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[–] Thunderbird4@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

And if you tried to run more than one HDD and got those jumpers wrong, it would let the magic smoke out of one of your drives.

[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don’t remember it being that bad. I remember the system just wouldn’t detect the drive.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, that never happened. Smoke coming out of the drive would require a short, or power where power isn't supposed to go.

[–] Thunderbird4@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, I dunno what to say besides that it happened to me twice. Probably close to 25 years ago while upgrading my 12GB HDD to a 80GB Seagate Barracuda, I decided to try running both drives together for a whopping 92GB of storage. Whatever jumper combination I tried first ended up with one of the drives not being recognized, so I tried another combination, either both master or both slave, and the control board on the 12GB drive let out the smoke and that drive was never able to be recognized again. I don’t remember exactly what happened the second time, but I know it happened twice because I felt really stupid about not learning my lesson from the first time. Not saying there couldn’t have been something else going on, but they had keyed IDE headers that couldn’t have been reversed and no other issues until I tried the incompatible jumper combination.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

My guess is that you didn't put on the jumper properly and accidentally shorted them out. I know I shorted out things back in those days by putting jumpers on wrong. But who knows, you might be right. It was so long ago and the effects of getting a setting wrong were often so much more serious back then.