I think you're worried about nothing.

Every time you hot plug stuff, especially with both the monitor and the PC plugged in, there is a tiny chance you may kill something. Which also depends on if wiring, grounding, etc is done properly in your house. Kind of similar to chances of killing stuff with ESD - not zero, but small.

It would, however, be instantly evident and since everything works you are definitely worried about nothing.

Also i've plugged in VGA with monitor on and PC running at work countless, countless times and do not remember ever killing anything.

Archer57 wrote on Yesterday, 00:30:

Every time you hot plug stuff, especially with both the monitor and the PC plugged in, there is a tiny chance you may kill something. Which also depends on if wiring, grounding, etc is done properly in your house. Kind of similar to chances of killing stuff with ESD - not zero, but small.

It would, however, be instantly evident and since everything works you are definitely worried about nothing.

Also i've plugged in VGA with monitor on and PC running at work countless, countless times and do not remember ever killing anything.

Ok - well, I feel a little better. No point in fretting about it, I guess.

What started as a simple hard drive swap, ended up being an enormous waste of effort.

1. I ordered a Seagate 80GB hard drive from eBay to install Windows 98 on this machine
2. I have a Western Digital drive with DOS/XP installed that worked perfectly
3. Early this morning, I removed the WD drive and installed the Seagate.
4. Upon boot up, I got a SMART error. I went into the BIOS and it reported the drive was failing (error code 7). Upon exiting the BIOS screen, the display started showing odd characters and I yanked the plug.
5. I removed the Seagate and put the WD back in. Now BIOS reports the WD is failing. However, I booted into XP fine.
6. I ran WD Diagnostics and the drive is fine. Now I’m wondering if the Seagate drive was bad after all.

Well, somewhere between steps 5 and 6 above, I connected in the monitor and after the fact realized the monitor was plugged into my UPS. The PC was unplugged.

What an incredible waste of time. I’m gonna wipe the WD and install 98 on it.
When I get it up and running, I’ll run 3DMark99 and 2000 so test the card.

Thanks for the responses and listening to me vent. Maybe I’ll have that beverage now….

Archer57 wrote on Yesterday, 00:30:

It would, however, be instantly evident and since everything works you are definitely worried about nothing.

Exactly ... the chances of actual damage are very small, but if it had happened, you'd notice things "not working right"
right away! You're not going to get "gradual degradation" from a static discharge or some sort of circuit overload
- it would have killed something!

Assuming this a VGA connection, the VGA connection is a protected circuit.
VGA is also TTL where the maximum voltage is going to be 5v on the horizontal sync.

Both CRTs (Made after the 90's) and LCDs have a separated high voltage and low voltage sections on the PCB in the monitor. Thus the high voltage never reaches any of the monitor's outputs.
This design is in place for the very reason to NOT allow the issue you are describing to happen.

Without getting more technical and also the ground in the monitor is going to be the path of least resistance.

No, connecting a powered on Monitor to a pc that is off, will never harm the PC.
If this was a thing then there would be thousands in not millions of dead PCs.

Matchstick wrote on Yesterday, 02:15:

Assuming this a VGA connection, the VGA connection is a protected circuit. VGA is also TTL where the maximum voltage is going t […]
Show full quote

Assuming this a VGA connection, the VGA connection is a protected circuit.
VGA is also TTL where the maximum voltage is going to be 5v on the horizontal sync.

Both CRTs (Made after the 90's) and LCDs have a separated high voltage and low voltage sections on the PCB in the monitor. Thus the high voltage never reaches any of the monitor's outputs.
This design is in place for the very reason to NOT allow the issue you are describing to happen.

Without getting more technical and also the ground in the monitor is going to be the path of least resistance.

No, connecting a powered on Monitor to a pc that is off, will never harm the PC.
If this was a thing then there would be thousands in not millions of dead PCs.

Awesome! Yes, it’s a VGA connection. Thank you for the info! Millions of dead PCs - 🤣! Something about that kinda makes me 😂 laugh!

MusicStudent1 wrote on Yesterday, 01:33:

What started as a simple hard drive swap, ended up being an enormous waste of effort. […]
Show full quote

What started as a simple hard drive swap, ended up being an enormous waste of effort.

1. I ordered a Seagate 80GB hard drive from eBay to install Windows 98 on this machine
2. I have a Western Digital drive with DOS/XP installed that worked perfectly
3. Early this morning, I removed the WD drive and installed the Seagate.
4. Upon boot up, I got a SMART error. I went into the BIOS and it reported the drive was failing (error code 7). Upon exiting the BIOS screen, the display started showing odd characters and I yanked the plug.
5. I removed the Seagate and put the WD back in. Now BIOS reports the WD is failing. However, I booted into XP fine.
6. I ran WD Diagnostics and the drive is fine. Now I’m wondering if the Seagate drive was bad after all.

This may be a bit offtopic, but since you mentioned it... think really, really carefully before getting vintage HDDs. This are mechanical devices, they tend to degrade and fail over time. Unless you want "the experience" including noise, reliability and performance - consider modern storage options. They are available for pretty much any system be it floppy emulators, IDE-CF, IDE-SD or IDE-SATA adapters. Will save you a lot of trouble and frustration.

I personally also tend to disable SMART check in BIOS and just use some 3rd party tool to read SMART, be it smartctl/smartmontools or crystal disk info...

Archer57 wrote on Yesterday, 03:53:

MusicStudent1 wrote on Yesterday, 01:33:

What started as a simple hard drive swap, ended up being an enormous waste of effort. […]
Show full quote

What started as a simple hard drive swap, ended up being an enormous waste of effort.

1. I ordered a Seagate 80GB hard drive from eBay to install Windows 98 on this machine
2. I have a Western Digital drive with DOS/XP installed that worked perfectly
3. Early this morning, I removed the WD drive and installed the Seagate.
4. Upon boot up, I got a SMART error. I went into the BIOS and it reported the drive was failing (error code 7). Upon exiting the BIOS screen, the display started showing odd characters and I yanked the plug.
5. I removed the Seagate and put the WD back in. Now BIOS reports the WD is failing. However, I booted into XP fine.
6. I ran WD Diagnostics and the drive is fine. Now I’m wondering if the Seagate drive was bad after all.

This may be a bit offtopic, but since you mentioned it... think really, really carefully before getting vintage HDDs. This are mechanical devices, they tend to degrade and fail over time. Unless you want "the experience" including noise, reliability and performance - consider modern storage options. They are available for pretty much any system be it floppy emulators, IDE-CF, IDE-SD or IDE-SATA adapters. Will save you a lot of trouble and frustration.

I personally also tend to disable SMART check in BIOS and just use some 3rd party tool to read SMART, be it smartctl/smartmontools or crystal disk info...

I considered an IDE to SATA. Yes, I should be using an SSD. I had issues with my WD drive being too large for the BIOS (at least that’s what my research revealed). I had to wipe it, fdisk it making the partition smaller, and reinstall Windows 98. It worked but yeah - I wasted an incredible amount of time.

I run almost nothing but mechanical HDDs for my rigs - both retro ones and my daily drivers (no Windows 10 here, so it's not a big deal.) No data loss in 20 years... though I did have one WD 800JD fail on me about 5-6 years ago... and one of the same to be failing soon. Also had a 20 GB IBM Travelstar corrupt its MFT badly in my previous personal laptop. But I tend to keep backups of my important stuff, so nothing got affected. And the IBM HDD was still able to recover the lost files after a long disk checkup session... well, sort of - the files got recovered, but not their names or extensions. 🤣 Ah well, format and start over. I had all my data backed up anyways. FWIW, that drive is still usable. I just don't trust it for a personal "main PC" (laptop) use anymore... which is fine anyways, because the laptop it was in is a Pentium 3, and a bit hard to use for modern everyday stuff, to say the least.

Yeah, mechanical HDDs can fail. But they are not that terrible - not all of them anyways. There are just certain ones to avoid and others that are OK.
My personal preference is for the Seagate Barracuda ATA III, IV, V and 7200.7 series as these have been the most reliable for me... along with Samsung Spinpoints from the same era/years.

Anyways, the fact that both your WD and you Seagate displayed got flagged as bad by BIOS suggests you might have a bad IDE cable on your hands. Check and/or swap it. Also, if that Seagate was mine, I'd put it into an XP machine and read its SMART from a 3rd party tool, as Archer57 suggested. I typically use either HDtune or CrystalDisk. And if I want just a quick check on the SMART, I also have a very small tool called DiskCheckup. It's tiny and takes no time to load (compared to HDTune and CrystalDisk sometimes) so is very fast to check SMART status on HDD.

Do that and see what you get for the Seagate. If it's not making any weird noises, it might be just fine.

Oh, and regards to the monitor thing/question... I think Matchstick answered it pretty well. VGA is indeed a protected circuit, and even static discharge shouldn't be able to kill it, unless the static discharge is of really really high energy type. That's because there are diodes on both ends of the VGA circuit that shunt any voltage below -0.7 to ground or above 5.7V to to the 5V supply. If the energy pulse is small enough, nothing bad will happen. But if the pulse is large enough to literally blow up a diode junction, then that's when you'll see it / smell it when you try to power on the device.

momaka wrote on Yesterday, 18:28:

I run almost nothing but mechanical HDDs for my rigs - both retro ones and my daily drivers (no Windows 10 here, so it's not a b […]
Show full quote

I run almost nothing but mechanical HDDs for my rigs - both retro ones and my daily drivers (no Windows 10 here, so it's not a big deal.) No data loss in 20 years... though I did have one WD 800JD fail on me about 5-6 years ago... and one of the same to be failing soon. Also had a 20 GB IBM Travelstar corrupt its MFT badly in my previous personal laptop. But I tend to keep backups of my important stuff, so nothing got affected. And the IBM HDD was still able to recover the lost files after a long disk checkup session... well, sort of - the files got recovered, but not their names or extensions. 🤣 Ah well, format and start over. I had all my data backed up anyways. FWIW, that drive is still usable. I just don't trust it for a personal "main PC" (laptop) use anymore... which is fine anyways, because the laptop it was in is a Pentium 3, and a bit hard to use for modern everyday stuff, to say the least.

Yeah, mechanical HDDs can fail. But they are not that terrible - not all of them anyways. There are just certain ones to avoid and others that are OK.
My personal preference is for the Seagate Barracuda ATA III, IV, V and 7200.7 series as these have been the most reliable for me... along with Samsung Spinpoints from the same era/years.

Anyways, the fact that both your WD and you Seagate displayed got flagged as bad by BIOS suggests you might have a bad IDE cable on your hands. Check and/or swap it. Also, if that Seagate was mine, I'd put it into an XP machine and read its SMART from a 3rd party tool, as Archer57 suggested. I typically use either HDtune or CrystalDisk. And if I want just a quick check on the SMART, I also have a very small tool called DiskCheckup. It's tiny and takes no time to load (compared to HDTune and CrystalDisk sometimes) so is very fast to check SMART status on HDD.

Do that and see what you get for the Seagate. If it's not making any weird noises, it might be just fine.

Oh, and regards to the monitor thing/question... I think Matchstick answered it pretty well. VGA is indeed a protected circuit, and even static discharge shouldn't be able to kill it, unless the static discharge is of really really high energy type. That's because there are diodes on both ends of the VGA circuit that shunt any voltage below -0.7 to ground or above 5.7V to to the 5V supply. If the energy pulse is small enough, nothing bad will happen. But if the pulse is large enough to literally blow up a diode junction, then that's when you'll see it / smell it when you try to power on the device.

Awesome responses, everybody, I really appreciate the information. I live in a 1994 - 2005 computer world. Almost every program I own or piece of hardware that interests me is from that time period. Friends have donated to me PCs from that time period that they were taking to the recycle center.

I also got an A+ certification in 2001 and worked in computer forensics in the early 2000s. We used dozens of IDE drives during search warrants for evidence storage. The only one that really was 100% worthless was a Fujitsu drive that had a recall (the insulation on the circuit board would melt and cause a short.)

I might get some rounded IDE cables for the sake of case airflow, good idea. I bet the Seagate drive is ok. I did have some Maxtor drives fail recently. More than one. They did fail SMART tests and as I recall the “Max Blast” Maxtor diagnostics. I use the heck out of Seagate Seatools for DOS and WD Drive Diagnostics for DOS to write zeros to every sector before installing any operating system. That is somewhat of a drive functions test in itself.

We treated the equipment pretty fearlessly back in my computer forensics days. I’m sure I connected monitors that were plugged in before.

I have learned that every time I open the PC up, there’s a chance of flexing the motherboard or a PC Card with a clumsy hand and maybe cracking it, forgetting to unplug power, dropping a flashlight in the case (I use a headlamp now), or some other human error accident.

I installed Windows 98 on my PC and am getting M1Tank Platoon 2, Aquanox 2, Tron 2.0, Incoming, Star Wars Pod, and a bunch of other games installed tonight.

I’ve run 3DMark99, 2000, and 2001 today. All is ok with the graphics card and HDD.

Thanks again! 👍🏻👍🏻