It's not sure the port is pooched. Maybe there was a bit of dust between the connector and the cable. These things are delicate and it doesn't take much for them to malfunction.
It's entirely possible that if you put the cable back onto the previous port it'll work again.

That said, maybe the new port is a sata600 port instead of a sata300 port? While this is no reason in itself as to why it failed (since sata 600 and sata300 are backwards compatible), your disk *is* a sata600 model so you could just as well connect it to the best port available.