WeatherPaparazzi

I did it old school and just ripped the wires out of an old computer case and used wires that went from the front of the case to the computers mother board (usb power and reset wires). Hey, it worked since radio shack and several of the local computer stores had nothing that would work on hand.

I had the same problem but it was fixed when I added the ground wire. See a few pages back about how I fixed my problem.

I'm getting the same arrow -> and would like a bit of confirmation if possible, please. Where you say 'pin 3 in terminal socket' - do you mean pin 3 on the seagate PCB? Pin 3 on the PCB needs to be grounded. I just used the ground from the RS232 TTL power source (3.3v) and made a third jumper wire to go to the third pin on the PCB. Then per Aviko, I then with the power supply off to the computer plugged in the power from the PS to the HDA with PCB attached like normal but no SATA cable and turned the power on to the computer PS. Then I put the battery to the 3.3v into the holder to power the RS232 TTL with everything hooked up to my computer serial port and hit connect in hyper termial. I went from the farking arrow to the actual text. Once I did that, I knew I had the right setup and everything was talking. Then turned off hyper terminal, turned off the computer PS (CPS) and pulled out the battery from the TTL board. THEN I removed the PCB and put thick paper under BOTH the contacts and then replaced most of the screws except for the one that goes to the motor and the PCB board to HDA. Then I restarted the CPS and then put the battery back in and restarted hyper terminal and then followed the instructions to fix the BSY HDA problems. Then I felt whole again because this saved my arse big time!

SUCCESS, YES IT WORKS!!!!!!! HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY Thanks you Aviko for helping me out!!!!! You just saved my life!!! Seriously!!! I am a freelance videographer on a tight budget and this drive had all of my best raw storm chasing footage from 2008 on it that I thought was lost forever. I was in the middle of backing everything up and building a raid setup to house all the files when this thing crashed. So thank you AVIKO for taking the ball on this and holding my hand to get this to work. And thank you to Gradius2 for starting this topic in the first place. You all get some major credit for helping everyone out to put this thing together. So, for future readers here is what happened to me and!! what I did to fix it thanks to the help from this forum. If you get the ARROW, you need to follow AVIKO's advice and add in the second ground. I used an older laptop that we had in storage that had an RS232 port and took the face plate off the RS232 TTL board and plugged it right into the port on the back of the computer. If you still can't get the board to talk to you in hyper terminal, hook up the board to the power supply in the computer and the 3v power supply on the RS232 TTL board and then start hyper terminal You should get the real text on the screen that Aviko and the rest are talking about. NOTE, when I hooked this up to the power supply in my computer, I pulled the SATA and power cables off of all the other drives so I did not risk hurting any more data when I tried this. I'm back up and running and copying all the data over to a 1tb western digital USB drive. THANK YOU GUYS!!!!!

DUDE, hooked it back up to the HDA, It's coming back to life now with the power hooked up from the power supply from the computer!!! I finally got it to say F3 T> LED:000000CC FAddr:0024A051 I will be reviewing the older posts to figure out what to do from here. THANK YOU, YOU ROCK!!! And I know there are others that have to be having this same problem so I think this will help since this was a long part of several pages of this topic. If I can get my data back, it will save my life!!!

It's a ST31000340AS Here is a photo of the drive. I'm also trying to do this on another computer now just to see if that makes a differance.

Nope, don't think your an id***. Just trying to narrow down where the fault is at my end. Your helping out big time but the error is at this end since I get the same problem with both the good drive (500 gig) and the bad drive, the 1TB PCB. Ok so I switched the wires to the pins on the drive and now none of the lights come on. I'm at a loss and trying to review all the steps again and again.

Aviko, Ok, I'm making progress but I think I might have still one more issue. The Cable. Now the lights come on to the rs232ttl board since I hooked the third cable up to the ground. This did not happen before. When hook the rs232ttl to the serial port, the green tx light goes out. When I also hook the rs232ttl board up to the null modem cable I have, the light goes out. It still does not talk to the PCB. I did not hook up the main power supply from the computer yet as I wanted to make sure it would at least talk to the PCB. Any ideas? EDIT I also hooked this up to another 500 gig drive and still does not talk to the drive via terminal.

Here is something interesting to think about. The Bios would not see the drive but get this, when I took the PCB off the HDA and hooked the PCB up to the computer just to see what would happen (yes I'm in fark it mode now) the Bios saw the drive. It was a 0GB hard drive but the Bios saw the PCB. Now with the Zero Gig drive on the PCB, could one do the upgrade from seagate without the HDA hooked up and then just attach the HDA to the PCB after the firmware upgrade?

So, this is just as simple as make a third wire from the ground on the RS232 Board where the power is connected and connect that third wire to the ground pin on the PCB. Thats It? That Simple?

I still get the Arrow Yes, a Arrow and I have pictures and screen caps. I purchased 2 different RS232 TTL boards with the second being from the company in first post of this topic. I can't get the terminal to talk to the hard drive. I also tried a second seagate drive that has the same firmware (SD15) and still nothing. NOTE, I do not have the RS232 TTL setup hooked up via cable. This is connected straight to the back of the laptop using Hyper Terminal. I tried it with a Null Modem Cable and could not get anything ether. Here is the whole setup powered by the two AA. Here is a close up of the RS232TTL that I bought. Here is the pins and cables hooked up to the PCB Here is a photo of the drive label And here is the Farking Arrow on the screen. Arrow, Not > but ARROW. Sorry getting p***ed off that I can't get any further then this step of the process. I have a ton of video stuff for work on this drive and I was in the middle of backing it up when it crashed into BSY from what I can tell. HELP, at my wits end here.

Tried again today and now I don't get any response from the hyperterminal. Not sure if the RS232 TTL board went bad but I ordered another one that was listed in the first posts. The drive still spins up but still no response.

I tried this with two AA bats for power and got the blue light to come on the board and I also tried this with the 5v power from the computer. I still get nothing but jiberish and the arrow depending on how the wires are hooked up. The funny thing is, the Arrow only shows up if the wires are backwards. One thing to note, I am not using an RS232 cable. I plugged this right into the port on the back of a laptop. Do I need to have it hooked up to a cable vs right into the port on the computer?

On a hunch, I hooked up another drive that I knew was good. Another Seagate and I got the same errors. I suspect that the RS232-TTL connector that I bought off ebay is bad. Going back to the start and buying the parts from the parts list in the first post that we know work. Also, this is the setup I purchased. Is this the right one? http://cgi.ebay.com/RS232-Serial-Port-To-T...1QQcmdZViewItem

Do I want to isolate the motor contacts or all contacts on the PCB?

I had the arrow at first too even though I was sure I followed the terminal connections correctly; when flipped the terminals and completely removed the pcb there no problem. I want to mention I restarted hyperterminal-I didn't just flip the connections while hyperterminal was on. OK, I have the PCB off the HDA. I still get the Arrow but thats all I get now. Is this correct? Also thanks to the people that put this together but can you move your credit fight to another topic, some of us are still trying to figure this out and it's a b***h to read through the stuff for info and the who gets credit. You all get credit for this if this works!

The board is an RS232-ttl board. No cable hooked up since I pluged it right into the RS232 port on the back on an older laptop. I tried both connections and it still just gave me jiberish on the screen. Do I need to have a cable go between the RS232 board and the computer? That is the only step that I am missing since I just pluged it directly to the computer. That board I got is an MDRS3232m Ver 1.0 The power LED lights up when I hook up the 3V to it with 2AA bateries. It's trying to communicate but when I type Control Z it just gives me garbage on the screen. The hard disk does spin up if I have power to it. Just stuck in BSY. Any ideas?

Ok, I have the drive hooked up but in hyperterminal all I get is jiberish. It shows it is communicating with the drive. I tried fliping the tx and rx connection and then all I got was an arrow but I could not get anything by pressing Control Z The board on the HDA and I got this then I removed the board from the HDA and still got this. Power is up with 2AA and the led power light comes on the RS232 TTL Board. Is there something wrong in hyperterminal?

Good Question, what do those of us do if the Bios wont see the drive? I talked to On Track today and it will cost $500-$1900 to recover my data. That does not include the $100 fee just to look at the drive to see if they can recover the data.

Number:9QJ03****:ST31000340AS:9BX158-335:SD15:08461:KRATSG:2008/07/15:2009/01/19:Microcenter:MinneapolisMN:US:fail :Windows XP SP3: How or were to you buy the unlocking BSY stuff? This is a major video editing drive that is only a temp drive were I put files on to be edited before saving the master catalogs to several other drives. This has really hosed me big time and I just bought a 1.5 TB drive last week that I'm going to be backing up to a 1tb Western Digital Drive now. I was in the middle of backing up data from the 1TB SeaBrick last night and shut the computer down to power the system down and swap USB drives to back up data. Powered it back up and NADDA. Not even showing up in the bios. After pullling it out of the computer I put it in a SATA docking station to try it on several other computers and nothing. Even the copy of Ontrack could not see this thing. How do I fix the BSY issue Where did you buy the kit, I want one.