Erk... messed up here :( (HDD Upgrade)

I've bought myself a 1.8" HDD to upgrade my AAO with, now - I tried shaving the cable down to fit into the ZIF connector on the hard drive and succeeded only in knackering the cable, no biggie - £3 later and i've ordered two more off eBay. The problem I have is that the latch on the zif connector on the HDD has snapped...

I was gently pulling it out of the HDD while attempting to fit the shaved cable in (before it was knackered) and it kinda caught under my fingernail and snapped in two. (pic below)



The hard drive now looks like this:



(apols for poor pics)

Is there anything I can do to sort this out? Can the latches be bought seperately or am I going to have to wedge it into the hdd when the new cables come? also are pins down or up on this style of connector?

Thanks in advance

 

well this forum was a lot of help.

ultimately it was an expensive mistake, the hdd is knackered because the pins are up when open - as the retainer is not there, the pins are permanently down, which means no matter how hard you try you can't put a zif cable in.

 

Could you glue a strip of plastic across the two broken halves with plastic model cement?

 

As long as the pins on the device are accurately lined up with the contacts on the cable, you could be okay.

Sometimes a shim will keep things snug. Worked with a damaged display connector for me.

 

w00t... sorted it

thanks for the replies above but I thought "what you got to lose?" and brutally assaulted the drive with the blue-end of the zif cable. It went in, it stayed in (even after me bending hell out of the pins on the zif socket), it was detected first time and now it's chugging away installing XP.

Whoever came up with the monikers of ZIF and LIF being acronyms for Zero Insertion Force and Light Insertion Force had no idea of their use on a hard drive. I would call it a RALOF connector - Rather A Lot Of Force - from now on.