Stupid Question: What Happens If You Accidentally Disconnect HDD Power

[KevinLancaster]

I idiotically did this twice, the first when I was trying to remove my secondary harddrive and having not worked with them in a while removed power to my primary by accident, and the second when I restarted and again tried to remove my secondary harddrive but accidentally knocked out the power to my primary because I hadn't connected it properly. The computer started up fine and I ran a CHKDSK and nothing seemed corrupted, so do I have a problem?

 

[Ztruker]

If you have a problem, it would be very evident. You were lucky so be very careful in the future.

 

[linnemeyerhere]

Helpful tip, play with the hardware while the system is off and you are grounded.

 

[Faladu]

Well if the Hard Drive was writing data at the time it would be corrupted at the very least and depending on what was being done at the time, worse things, say it was reading BIOS replacement code, after just having wiped the BIOS code... That is very bad indeed! Never flash firmware during a thunderstorm without an active UPS!

The hard drive is not a plug and play device under normal circumstances, so if you do accidentally disconnect a drive that didn't have your Windows loaded on it, then quickly shutdown the PC, then reconnect the drive, and hopefully the damage is minimal, especially if it was actually idle or the hard drive in questions heads were in the parked position.

Then just run SFC /scannow and chkdsk /R from a command prompt as insurance.

So OP, I would run SFC /scannow on that system to verify your windows files are fine.