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.