While connecting my 80-wire cable to the hard drive I again bent one or more pins in the drive's IDE interface. I got one of them straight again, but another pin broke off.
According to the schematics on this page, the pin that broke off is '40 Ground'.
I connected the hard drive to my normal PC using a USB HDD enclosure under Windows 10, but it did not get detected. I then applied the second method under "For Broken Pin" on this link. I had to shorten the needle I used for it to fit. When I had the hard drive hooked up to my enclosure with the needle inside the IDE cable's connector at the same location where a pin in the drive's interface is missing, Device Manager suddenly 'saw' the disk. The application flagged the space on the disk as "unallocated". When I right-clicked on the disk, a menu with the following options was displayed: 'Initialize disk', 'Offline' and 'Properties'. The following error was shown when I clicked 'Initialize disk': "The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error".
I tried again with another needle. Same result.
Is there a way to get this drive operational again?
When I powered on my Pentium 1 system without the hard drive, it again wouldn't boot. There was a short buzz from the internal speaker and no image. Guess I'll have to disconnect and reconnect everything again?