Can an IDE cable damage HDDs?

[Unfocused]

This is happening to me for the second time.

I buy a new HDD and make it a master drive, install a clean system on it and boot from it. I still use the old HDD, as I got my stuff there and sometimes I boot from the old HDD, when I want to retrieve some settings for example. However shortly after, the old HDD starts to fail - it causes the PC to behave weird while trying to read certain parts of the drive (not only it takes long, but it also causes the PC to come to a halt for a few seconds, work for a few seconds, halt and repeat this a few times).

Is this a coincidence that once again after switching to a new HDD, the old one starts failing? Or can a faulty IDE cable or power cable cause this (or something else?).

 

[VirusType2]

Is it possible to put the other drive on a different EIDE cable? You should have two. Not sure if that will help, but i have heard that it can cause problems.

You could also buy new cables just to be sure it's not a faulty cable. I picked some up at Office Max for 1.50 (clearance price) that were UV reactive (glow in blacklights), they were round instead of ribbon, so it doesn't block airflow, and they had little built in pullers to remove them easily.

 

[Unfocused]

I thought of buying a different cable, but just to be clear - I was asking if it can actually damage the HDD, not only cause bad dataflow.

Because the first time I bought a second HDD and made it my main one, the old HDD started acting weird and eventually died (ie. it has lots of badsectors; a HDD diagnostic tool reached a 100 bad sectors all next to each other and aborted the test). IIRC the temperature sensor is damaged cause it shows high temps. when the HDD is cool (just plugged into the PC). So maybe something's generaly fried in there and damaged some stuff.

 

[Asus]

A bad IDE cable can cause the DATA on the drive to be corrupt (which could also mean issues while booting).
But the hardware wouldn't be bad. If you put the drive in a new system/new IDE cable and format it and use it then it would be all good.

A different type of corruption is when an actual sector on the drive goes bad (not because of the cable). You can reconfigure the drive with software to ignore that sector so it goes unused with HDD diagnostic software. That is how drives are made when they are new. A drive is made with extra sectors and they detect the few bad sectors and tell it to ignore those and ship it.
But after a few years of use and you get a bad sector then they start failing quicker and quicker. So it would be more of a pain to keep doing the above to save the drive. Easier to junk it and get new.