almost cried...

[reddrag0n]

I put in my USB extension cable into my Sawtooth (for when i get my AirPlus G wireless) and when i rebooted my machine, i had no slave present. Meaning my CD and third hard drive wasn't connected. I opened my machine, double checking all my work, checking all wires, but nothing. So, after turning it off, i proceeded to rip out all my work to see what went wrong. After careful examination i found out that i had punched pin 1 on my slave IDE cable right underneath the last hard drive carrier. I must have tightened the screw on it from underneath a little too hard. But anyways after seeing that, i almost had a heart attack and cried. I thought to myself, I don't have a replacement IDE cable for that. Almost giving up, i had a thought. I remembered that i still had the cables from the old B&W i had. Ripping my room apart looking for the cable, i found it. A little longer that the sawtooth one, but who cares. This time i carefully put the cable in, bending it in the right places and double checking not to pinch that cable. After quad checking my work, i closed everything up and booted my machine. Now everything works as it had before. Thank god i didn't throw out all of my old B&W hardware. Now i can rest properly and try to find some heart medication to slow my heart down from beating at 5000 beats per minute.

Moral of this article...
QUAD AND QUINTUPLET CHECK YOUR WORK!!! You will thank yourself later.

[rampancy]

Yes, I can vouch for that. I've had countless headslapping moments where after I've plugged in all of my USB devices I realized I've done something dense like forget to put the EMI shield on my drive case or screw in mounting screws.

The worst for me was nearly losing screws in the little nooks and crannys of the motherboard.

Of course, the margin for error is much tighter when you're talking about watercooling...

[aquamac]

Yup did almost exactly the same thind on the IDE cable on a Quicksilver, the cd drive would sometimes be there, sometimes not, did exactly the same thing, pinched it. However my cable was shorting out to the case, so when I released it & bandaged it, the thing worked again!

[reddrag0n]

After i looked at this cable, pin 1 was completly gone in a 3mm area. not a good sight to see.

edit
here is a pic of what the break looked like.