Originally posted by: JackDanielsDrinker
OK, I just did it again.
I have my 3.5 inch drive cage unscrewed and sitting on the 5.25 inch cage. The bottom hard drive was exposed to the metal 5.25 cage.
Can you say MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION?
Good Lord I need a Jack.
That reminds me.. a long time ago, I had an ancient 120MB (yes, MB) Maxtor IDE HD. (It was from my 386 days). I had it in a system as a spare HD for testing, and I had it running, unmounted, on top of the case with the PCB facing up. Well, wouldn't you know it, I slipped and dropped my (heavy!) metal-bottom keyboard, right onto the PCB of the spinning HD.
Ka-thunk! Head crash! Funfunfun.
I think I've since gotten rid of the HD, but for a period of time immediately after that incident, attempting to use the HD would result an an occasionally KA-THUNK as the head smacked the platters once again. You could actually visibly watch the bad-sector defects grow, if you ran sucessive SCANDISK surface-scans.
The above, is a definately example of what NOT to do with a HD. (In fact, I don't even recommend spinning-up a HD without securely mounting it in some sort of chassis.)