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Azkatro

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  1. I can report another successful recovery of the LBA0 bug using the information in this brilliant forum. I used a cheap, GENERIC Nokia CA-42 cable to do the job. More specifically, it was a board utilising the commonly found Prolific 2303 chipset. This particular version is the PL-2303HXA (Product Info). It came with a driver CD and cost me $1.25 AUD from a Chinese vendor based in Sydney (I am in Australia). After getting it in the mail in a couple of days, I cut the Nokia plug end off and stripped the wires. I then managed to get the USB plastic covers off the other end to expose the board and reveal which wire was which. Unfortunately the only wire that was labeled on the board was the GND (Ground). There were four other wires and they were white, blue, green and orange. Other Nokia cables I'd seen had varying colours and numbers of wires. Initially I had problems, I experimented with different wires in attempting a loopback test but had no luck. I set it up to use HyperTerminal, and when I hit connect nothing happened when I typed no matter what combination I tried. Still, I plowed ahead and tried communicating with the drive itself. In connecting just what I thought were the Tx and Rx wires to the drive pins (reversed of course), using the SATA power on the drive, I would get garbage coming into HyperTerminal until I connected the ground. Then if I turned it off and on again I would get the Rst 0x20M message. However, pressing Ctrl-Z had no effect no matter what I tried. So I had a rest and came back wondering if this particular cheap, generic, made in China cable didn't draw its power from the USB port but from the phone instead. With that in mind, I opted for a solution which uses the 3.3V orange wire and ground from the SATA power plug and suddenly the loopback test worked. So I hooked it up to the HDD again, Ctrl-Z worked perfectly and the commands all went according to plan. Rebooted, data 100% recovered. Here's my recipe in detail. Firstly, the ingredients: - One cheap generic Nokia CA-42 USB cable LEGEND: Orange = 3.3V VCC, Black = GND, White = Rx, Blue = Tx, Green = ?????????? (remember this may vary!) - Alligator clips - A CD audio cable you can hack to pieces - A knife or kitchen steak knife (or something else flat and sharp you can lever plastic tabs with) Here is a summary of what I did: 1. Buy cheap generic Nokia CA-42 cable off Ebay for $1.25. 2. Cut off the Nokia plug, trim back the plastic shielding and strip the ends of each wire (so you can connect pins and/or alligator clips to the metal strands). 3. Remove the blue plastic covers on the USB end (which in my case were glued on so a bit tricky). 4. Plug the USB into your computer and setup the drivers if needed. In my case, both Windows XP Pro (32-bit and XP64/x64) didn't recognise the device (Prolific USB-to-Serial Comm Port) so I had to use the supplied CD. 5. Once it's installed successfully, press Windows Key+Pause or go Control Panel, System. Select Hardware and click Device Manager. I've noticed some people find the Nokia cable listed under Modem devices, but in my case it was listed under Ports (COM & LPT). Make a note of the COM number shown in brackets next to the device (eg Prolific USB-to-Serial Comm Port (COM9)). 6. Shut down your computer, and work out which SATA power lead you're going to use. I'm not sure if you can use this method with a Molex to SATA power adaptor, as some I've seen don't include the 3.3V wire (the orange one). 7. Look at the top of the SATA power plug and you should notice there are little black plastic tabs holding each wire in place. Make sure you have unplugged the mains power from the back of your computer, and use a knife or similar to carefully lift up the tabs for the orange wire and the black wire on the end next to it (that's GND). When you manage to lift the tabs the wires should just slide out harmlessly. I have a ThermalTake power supply so that might have helped, I'm not sure how tricky it could be with a cheap PSU. 8. Use the alligator clips to connect the orange SATA power wire (3.3V) to the orange wire on the cable, and the black SATA wire to the black one on the cable. The important thing here is to just make sure you connect the metal pins on the SATA plug wires to the metal strands you've exposed in the wires. This is far from the most correct way to do this electronically speaking but as long as you keep them separate and make sure the alligator clips are on firmly enough that they won't just slide off, it should be sufficient for this job. 9. Now take the CD audio cable and cut off one end. On the other end, lift the little plastic tabs (similar to the SATA plug) and slide out two of the wires. On the other end, strip back some plastic shielding in order to expose the metal strands, similar to how you would have with the Nokia cable. 10. Use the alligator clips to connect the white wire on the Nokia cable to the metal strand end of one of the wires from the CD audio cable, and the blue wire on the Nokia cable to the second wire you took from the CD audio cable. 11. What we're going to do is slide the pins we extracted from the CD audio plug into the hard drive Tx and Rx pins. However when you try this you will find it's extremely loose fitting. The way we can fix this is by flattening the holes at the end of the CD audio wire pins a bit. I used the handle of a kitchen steak knife to do it. Don't do it too far, we just want to turn it from being a round hole at the end to an oval shape (or whatever happens when you squash it down a bit) so we can still slide it over the HDD pins, but it's a much firmer fit. As other posts mention, the hard disk's Rx pin is closest to the SATA plugs - connect that to the Nokia cable's blue wire, and the Nokia cable's white wire goes into the hard disk's Tx pin, which is right beside the Rx. Once you've got the pins sliding in there snugly, make sure there's no slipping by giving them a bit of a wriggle test and make sure they're not touching (you can ever so gently bend the pins just slightly apart if need be). 12. Now our Nokia cable has power, it's connected to the HDD, and it's grounded. Leave everything else disconnected (HD power & data, USB device disconnected), make 100% sure none of the wires you've hooked up are touching, and turn the computer on. 13. Once you've finished booting, plug the USB device in and make sure it gets detected and everything. You can double check the COM port again to be safe here. 14. Load HyperTerminal (start, programs, accessories, communications). 15. Give the connection any old name. 16. Select the COM port pertaining to the USB device and click Configure. 17. Do the settings - Bits per second 38400, Data bits 8, Parity None, Stop bits 1, Flow control None. Click OK to confirm. 18. Click OK again to connect. You should get a blank screen. At this stage I actually found I could type and see the characters as I guess when you have the USB device powered and connected to the hard disk pins it acts as a loopback. 19. Now it's time to plug the SATA power into the hard drive. I think this may vary, but I just saw "Rst 0x20M" appear in HyperTerminal. 20. Once you see that, hold down the CTRL key and press Z. You should see the prompt: F3 T> 21. Enter the command to regenerate the partition: F3 T>m0,2,2,0,0,0,0,22 (enter) 22. Wait a couple of minutes or whatever (no message will appear until it's done). Eventually you get the message which ends with User Partition Format Successful - Elapsed Time x mins x secs. (I think mine was actually 0 seconds, but it still worked). 23. Now do the following to spin down the drive: F3 T>/2 (enter) F3 2>Z (enter) Spin Down Complete Elapsed Time x secs F3 2> 24. Now you can unplug the drive's SATA power cable. Shut down the computer, unplug the USB device and unhook the little wires in the hard drive's Rx and Tx pins. Disconnect the SATA power plug's orange and black wires, and slide them back into the plug (did you remember which way around they went? the orange wire is on the end!) You will have to push the plastic tabs back down to lock them in again. 25. Plug SATA power and SATA data cables back in drive, boot machine. You should now hopefully find your drive is detecting at the correct size and your data is there, as I did!
  2. Hi all, just thought I'd add my 2c to this issue. I have a 500GB Barracuda, SD15 firmware, site code KRATSG. It carked it on December the 26th, 2008. Coincidentally, I had a 400GB Seagate in the same machine which died at the same time - although that was due to a loud whirring noise! So believe it or not, I went from 2 hard drives to booting up to none. Anyway I have been watching this thread hoping I'd be able to rescue my 500GB, all along I knew it was fine mechanically speaking. It gets detected in the BIOS, but the BIOS reports there is an error with the drive. Smart Tools indicates there is a SMART error, with the message "Drive has been overtemp (0)". However I don't think that's true, because the 400GB ran 10 degrees (celcius) hotter and its highest recorded temp in SMART is 53 degrees. Of course the other issue is it detects as being 0GB. The main reason I write is because I just tried to flash the newly released SD1A firmware (the second release) and it has changed nothing - the BIOS still reports an error and size as 0GB. Cheers and thanks to all who have contributed to this thread!
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