Today I needed to get some data off of an unbootable hard drive that was in a mount in a machine. Since I did not have a special screwdriver and the mount looked very difficult to work with, I decided I would just leave the drive where it was and connect cables from the real machine to it. The problem with that idea was that all the SATA power cables in the real machine were super short and could not reach.
So I carefully positioned the two machines so that the data cable would reach the hard drive from the bootable machine and connected a power cable from the unbootable machine to the drive. I powered on the unbootable machine first (I'm sure it got stuck in BIOS or something, no monitor was on it), then the bootable machine. The contraption worked - the drive was accessible and stayed online as long as I kept the old machine on.
This is also a good trick for situations where a motherboard is out of power cable slots.
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