Greetings!

It wasn't as much popping. The audio symptoms I heard were more of a skip / stutter, as though the disk was trying to find the next audio segment and could not keep up due to disk errors. But, in my case it was the IDE header and a rather severe case of it as well. (Based on the fact of how visible it was in the photo.) There were some other threads around documenting pops and clicks and that a cable replacement or recrimp made the symptoms vanish.