Windows 7: have i killed my HDD?

its quite an old 80gb seagate ide hard drive that i only use for backing stuff up that i dont know if i'll ever use again, its an internal drive but i dont keep it inside my pc instaed i use a usb cable and power cable, the other day i wasnt taking much notice of what i was doing and tried plugging in the power cable in upside down
it made a kind of cracking noise and i got that nasty burning smell and now it wont power up, have i killed it?

Well, if it no longer powers up, I'd venture a guess that it's dead. I have read of people buying an identical drive and swapping the card in order to retrieve data but it's pretty iffy whether that will work. If there's no super critical data on it, I would send it off to the recycler.

The good news is that hard drives are pretty cheap these days. In the future you might want to get an external case or even one of the USB/SATA/IDE adapters like this to use a drive externally. If you stick with SATA and don't need to support IDE drives, a dock like this is pretty foolproof.

I would consider it dead, not sure how you would recover the data if it doesn't power up :s

Probably didn't do that USB port any good either, it could be dead as well.

Ap

thanks for the info, luckily the usb port survived.