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Now, after using the bad drive in my good player, my good drive is having intermittant problems in my good player. Lag on boot, on screen messages "hda: irq time out" and "hda: status error" (or something like that). It often works, even with an onscreen error, but this is really disconcerting.

So, maybe the bad hard drive, from riding around at a 90 degree angle, has developed a bad condition. Furthermore, that condition damaged the IDE on the bad player, and maybe even the i2c also. Now, the drive has begun to damage my good player from the testing I did.

OR, I'm destroying the IDE cables when I tighten the crimps. I put the IDE connector between a few layers of my shirt and firmly squeeze it in about 10 places with plyers. Yes, the FAQ advises I use some complex tool, but this method has worked for my primary player's biannual loose IDE connector problem.

Or, I'm destroying the motherboard and drive IDE pins. I always seem to bend the few on the end as I remove the cable. Never hurt my main player, but maybe my luck's run out.

Watching my pristine spare empeg lag on boot and give onscreen disk errors is absolutely breaking my heart. I'm going to just walk away from this for now.