A word of advice; never play with internal connections with the power turned on ;)
I was installing a small LCD module into the server last night. This is a little display I've put together in my spare time, and written some software to drive it through the parallel port during the past couple of months. Its based on a backlit 128x32 graphic (ie no text support) LCD module we use at work. The machine was powered up while I installed it - just a power connector and a parallel cable. I'd done this a dozen times on the box I used to develop the software, without problems, as long as I made sure I plugged in the power before the parallel plug. As soon as the power connector mated the server froze up then spontaneously rebooted. It couldn't see the hard drive. Oh dear (substitute appropriate expletives). I nearly had a coronary thinking I'd killed the drive, and thus lost the installation I'd taken a couple of weeks to configure, not to mention my entire FTP archive where I store a copy of everything I download (drivers etc). I'm intending to back that up onto CD-R but the workstation is still out of action until I get a new hard drive for it. I pulled the drive out and plugged it into workstation #2 and it worked, whew. It turns out the I/O card had gone wonky. I threw in a spare, and after disabling the COM2/4 port this morning everything's fine (no wonder the modem was misbehaving after swapping the boards). I like older hardware; when you blow up an IDE controller you're not up for a new motherboard. At least the power-down gave me the opportunity to remove a couple of old 500Mb drives containing my old installation... Cheers, - Dave... http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/ (somewhat out of date)
