another hard drive failure story

[sethg-Dp9fwfP21SfQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org (Seth Gordon)]

jay-R5TnC2l8y5lBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org wrote:
> Have you tried disconnecting the dvd drive and using that port?

I tried that Tuesday night and, by golly, you're right; once I did that, 
the BIOS and Linux recognized that both drives were plugged in.

Unfortunately, by that point, the old drive was dead, Jim, dead.  I 
tried running ddrescue to image it, and all that accomplished was 
filling up /var/log with all the "bad sector" error messages.

Ah well.  At least I have practically everything backed up, which is 
more than I had the *last* time a hard drive conked out on me.

Thanks for all the tips.