Help with my hard drive

So I picked up a hard drive at a car boot sale and I think it might be cursed 😅

Whenever I plug it into my PC (SATA power + data), the entire system refuses to boot. I don’t even get into BIOS/UEFI — it just hangs on startup. The moment I unplug the drive, everything works perfectly again.

I’ve tried different SATA cables and ports, and I made sure it’s not set as a boot drive. Same result every time. The drive spins up and doesn’t make any weird clicking noises, but somehow it completely blocks the PC from even starting.

Is that actually a thing? Can a bad hard drive prevent POST/BIOS from loading, or does this point to a dead/shorted drive? I don’t want to risk frying anything else, so I stopped testing it for now.

Anyone run into this before?