I agree about the staggered pins. We fried a HDD or RAM (Can't remember which) in a PC once by accidentally having a floppy drive connector staggered one pin to the side. Strange how it took stuff out that was seemingly unrelated.
(As far as PC floppy drives are concerned, they don't seem mind a reversed floppy connector - I have two Sony FDD's in my XP tower as A: and B: that can only be used with a un-keyed floppy ribbon 'cause the crazy floppy drives have the keys in the wrong place for normal cables - With a normal cable the LED's on the front of the drives just stay on all the time...)
Hans_: Here's an idea re the VGA short...The HDD cases are usually grounded, in your case via the ribbon cable. On the A1200's the shield is grounded, but it’s grounded via a few low-ohm resistors if I remember rightly. That makes your HDD the lowest resistance path to ground in your miggy for any voltages placed on the shield, so if a power rail (The 23pin D video port contains power rails...) somehow touched the edge of one of the D connectors or some of the screen at the back of your A1200,
(And the case of your floppy drive wasn't grounded) then that would probably explain why the cable fried itself. :crazy:
