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Spent 4 hours chasing a ghost drive that was just a loose SATA cable
Was working on a client's Dell Optiplex from 2019 that kept dropping the secondary drive randomly. Ran every diagnostic tool I had, swapped the drive itself, updated firmware, the whole nine yards. Finally noticed the SATA cable had a tiny kink near the connector that was making intermittent contact. Fixed it in 30 seconds with a new cable, felt like a total goof. Has anyone else had a stupid simple fix like this eat up way more time than it should have?
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miles_roberts16d ago
30 seconds of cable swapping vs 4 hours of diagnostics, sounds about right for this job. Always the last thing you check, EVERY time.
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thompson.reese16d ago
@miles_roberts that's the one thing that never changes no matter how good you get at this stuff. I mean, I've done the same thing where I swapped out a whole PSU before realizing I just didn't push the 24-pin in all the way.
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leo_fisher16d ago
4 hours on a loose cable, that's a rough one. @miles_roberts I think you meant cable swap took 30 seconds, not the fix - but hey, the spirit's right. Had a similar thing where my PC kept blue screening, swapped RAM and everything, turned out one of my USB headers was shorting on the case.
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