Can hard drive cable kill the hard drive

No, IDE cables cannot make your HDD smoke.
No Ide Cable is Tuned to any one HDD
The possible Scenario is
A. The hard drive was faulty to begin with
B. it was knocked in transit (dropped and the heads being not alligned could cause it to seize)
I would say that you have been given a dodgy HDD.
My personal Choice of HDD is
Quantum Fireball CX
or Seagate
Excellent HDD's and i have never had a problem.
Good luck.

Hi,
Respondent #1 is correct. It is not true that the cable would "break" the harddrive. At worst, the harddrive would not spin up when you applied power and you most likely would then check or cable connection or replace the cable. I agree the harddrive was faulty unto itself and should have been returned to western digital. I have run their drives with no problems. Sorry this happened to you.

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this will give you browsing Enhancements
then, load your browser (IE4) then go to the VIEW or TOOLS tab(different, then go to INTERNET OPTIONS, then go to the CONNECTIONS tab. There you should see your proxy settings.
i would click "Do Not use proxy" and then go into settings and click "automatically detect Settings".
Good luck.

The new cable was probably a special cable to support UDMA/66 but that just has to do with the data and, by Western Digital's own specs, their drives are fully backwards compatible with standard IDE controllers and cables. It is also true that evena backwards cable should not cause this type of failure (and never has, in my experience).
Where I have seen smoking drives in the past was where someone managed to get a power cable in backwards but even in that case, most current-generation power supplies shut down long before the resulting fault current gets things hot enough to smoke.
It is conceivable, but not likely, that the old IDE cable had a dead short but I think the far more likely explanation is that the drive was defective to begin with or was damaged in some way unrelated to the cable (e.g. using too-long mounting screws that grounded out one of the internal circuit boards).
Don't take it too hard - these things happen and they happen to some of the best in the business.

paul

I agree with the first two answers.You where
sold a DUD! To be on the safe side,I would
try installing a used drive for test
purposes.Not all cables and drives are keyed.
You should have got error beeps if it was
not in correctly. good luck

In the last 16yrs of working on PC's and related equipment I have NEVER seen a drive cable smoke a drive. This includes MFM, RLL, ESDI, IDE and SCSI. The only thig that happens when you happen to plug in a cable backwards is that it isn't reconnizedby the system.