Man.....seagate and HP both suck. My drive on my Touchsmart pooched on friday. PC was hung in the AM, rebooted and no drive in the BIOS! So eventually I came to this post....I contacted seagate to get the data recovered and was told that the SN was not listed as one of the affected drives. After intellectually sparring with the creaton at seagate, he finally quasi-admitted that the OEM drives (sent to HP, Dell, etc..) were not listed/covered as they are sent blank (no firmware....supposedly) to them. I again advised that their "custom" firmware was based off of seagates PROPRIETARY code! and should therefore be covered....he basically said FU and contact HP. HP wants nothing to do with this....all they will do is RMA the drive....obviuosly I need the data..... So my question after reading all of these posts, is.....can I just lob off one end of an rs232 cable, connect the tx/rx pins up and power the drive with the PSU sata connector? I have a ton of rs232 cables oxidizing in my basement..... Secondly, I can go get another touchsmart at my local bestbuy with a 500GB drive...will changing the IO card, whether its same or new firmware, still get me a workable drive to grab the data from? 1299 is still cheaper than sending it out for data recovery and it can always be taken back thanks in advance!