Okay, I am not quite as doomed as I thought. Came in and secured on of the cables going to the motherboard, and it boots now again. So it looks like the "jcreed stupidly bumped one of the cables in the process of trying to connect the other HD" is winning out over "jcreed, destroyer of personal electronics". Still, what I am facing now is "/dev/hdc is not a valid block device" when I hook up my old laptop to where the CD drive was and do mount -t ntfs /dev/hdc /mnt/whatever . I would love to hear someone tell me I am stupidly invoking the wrong invocation, and i just need to pass it the --actually-work flag or something.