I went over a bump on the way to work this morning, and my MkII wedged. I was listening to the radio, and the sound just stopped and the buttons were not responding. Eeek! So, I pulled out the stereo and shoved it back in (hard boot!), and it came back up fine, but with wacky bumpy sounds coming out of the speakers, generally correlated with my driving (hit the breaks, evil sound comes from rear speakers). I thought my car was going into self-destruct mode, until I pulled the stereo and the sounds all stopped.

Turns out, there's now something rattling around inside my MkII that must have gotten jostled loose by that bump. I'm betting it's one of the screws I added to hold in my second hard drive. If the screw happened to bounce across the analog sections of the circuit board, that could explain the weird sounds.

I'll verify it tonight when I get home (meanwhile, the Empeg is out of the car).

Questions:

Could something like this cause permanent motherboard damage? Should I just put it all together again and, if it sounds good, assume that I'm just lucky?

Assuming it is a hard-drive mounting screw, should I use LockTite (or equivalent) to hold it in place? Has anybody else had one of these things come loose? It's been a couple months since I did the drive upgrade, so it's not implausible that a screw has been slowly working its way open.

*sigh*