That power plugging trick sounds like a plan for an internal drive.
When I had difficulties w/SCSI Drives they were invariably in external cases, these being the drives that came as standard equipment when I bought the Macs used, refurbished or new. Out came the standard drive and in went a brand new, much higher capacity, Seagate or Western Digital Drive, starting with the PowerBook 100's 20 MB drive slapped into an APS PowerBook Portable HDD Case and a 320MB Toshiba from the same purchase going into BabyPB. The A/B switch worked for those drives just fine, but I'm sure it's not a recommended procedure. [}
] ]'>
If you don't have one already, think about picking up one of the inexpensive SATA/IDE <-> USB-2 bridges. Mine cost around $15 and consists of a dongle with plugs for either drive type on it with a USB connector tail and a small AC adapter to run the drive. I end up using the little Power Brick for odds and ends on the bench more often than I use the actual adapter.
Having one plugged into a power strip in your situation would be safer than hot-plugging and less cumbersome than running an external supply connector from another computer in there.
The USB-2 bridge adapter also turns a pile of "too small to be really useful" IDE HDDs into a box full of goodies on disk or for use as gonzo thumb drives. :approve:
While we're on the subject of troubleshooting, having a couple of old AT/XT PSU's banging around in a box is a great thing for situations like this. Plug in the connector, plug in the PSU, flip the switch and you've got power. If you know what you're doing you can hoodwink an ATX PSU into the same type of behavior but . . . whatever!
When I had difficulties w/SCSI Drives they were invariably in external cases, these being the drives that came as standard equipment when I bought the Macs used, refurbished or new. Out came the standard drive and in went a brand new, much higher capacity, Seagate or Western Digital Drive, starting with the PowerBook 100's 20 MB drive slapped into an APS PowerBook Portable HDD Case and a 320MB Toshiba from the same purchase going into BabyPB. The A/B switch worked for those drives just fine, but I'm sure it's not a recommended procedure. [}
] ]'>If you don't have one already, think about picking up one of the inexpensive SATA/IDE <-> USB-2 bridges. Mine cost around $15 and consists of a dongle with plugs for either drive type on it with a USB connector tail and a small AC adapter to run the drive. I end up using the little Power Brick for odds and ends on the bench more often than I use the actual adapter.
Having one plugged into a power strip in your situation would be safer than hot-plugging and less cumbersome than running an external supply connector from another computer in there.
The USB-2 bridge adapter also turns a pile of "too small to be really useful" IDE HDDs into a box full of goodies on disk or for use as gonzo thumb drives. :approve:
While we're on the subject of troubleshooting, having a couple of old AT/XT PSU's banging around in a box is a great thing for situations like this. Plug in the connector, plug in the PSU, flip the switch and you've got power. If you know what you're doing you can hoodwink an ATX PSU into the same type of behavior but . . . whatever!