diddlyd

i got my ca-42 cable, and using Tera Term, got my 1.5 TB drive to fix itself using the m0 command. it took a lot longer than 30 seconds but eventually got through the low level format and reported success. but i'm not out of the woods yet. the bios now reports the drive model, firmware SD1B, as a 1500 GB drive, and windows recognizes it in disk management as a healthy 1397.25 primary partition. but windows explorer reports that it needs to be formatted before accessing it. obviously i don't want to lose any data on there. this is an NTFS format drive created under Vista64, and now i'm trying to read it under a separate install of Vista32. anybody know how to proceed? EDIT: it shows the filesystem as RAW under disk management in vista.

i made a bit of progress on this issue. i found (by ctrl-c out of batch job and using list.exe) that the command used by the batch file in the bootable firmware cd used: sf -m BRINKS -f -s -x -b -v -a 10 -h 8hcfgsd1.txs and this would get rejected as no matching drive found, im guessing based on my wild firmware version. then i found out that you could skip the .txs file, which i think is the part doing the check, and use the specific firmware .lod file, by using the following: sf -m BRINKS -f 8HBXR1B.LOD -s -x -b -v -a 10 (8HBXR1B.LOD is the name of the actual firmware image on the boot disc for my drive) and that succesfully flashed my drive to SD1B. Now im back to being stuck with 0GB capacity, so i guess i'll try the cable fix described in this thread next. *************** *** WARNING ***: the above workaround will not check for compatibility, and try to flash all drives connected to the system, so MAKE SURE your drive is a match for the firmware and no other drives are attached! ***************

thanks for the advice happybear, but no luck. i booted to the dos version of seatools, and it identifies my drive as i posted above, but when i tried to set it to max native size, it would bring up a dialog box asking for input like i hit "set drive capacity manually". nothing i entered would be accepted. i tried using the "set to 32GB" option, and it said that failed. both the long and short test immediately failed as well. this is what im trying to clarify. do the other people who have had their drive's suddenly start reporting 0 LBA or 0 GB size (but never had the busy bug, where it isn't even recognized by the bios) still show a normal bios version when they check their drives, or are they getting wild version numbers like i am? do i have a special case problem where my drive's firmware is so fried that it can't be communicated with, even using the techniques described in this thread, or will I still be able to fix it? i've been trying to get a response from seagate for about 10 days now, and not a word. surprise surprise.

I have a 1.5 TB seagate drive that is giving me 0GB capacity after a random reboot. it shows the following in drivedetect: Model: ST31500341AS, Serial: 9VS09SRT, Firmware: ZZ7L the firmware version seems whacked (it was SD17 before the problem popped up). i can't flash using the firmware cd i downloaded from seagate, it says no match found, even though the model number matches what it detects. i was assuming it didn't like the firmware version ZZ7L. my question is to people with the 0LBA problem, am I going to be able to fix my drive myself using this technique? I want to buy a CA-42 cable and use the command to quick format the drive, then update to the latest firmware and be done with these problems, but i haven't heard anyone else mention having a wild firmware version detected like i do, so I'm wondering if my problem is something worse. thanks