eldrummair

PLEASE HELP!!! I don't know if I'm the right track or not.... Originally i thought I had the BSY error as the drive was not recognized in BIOS, but when trying Gradius's fix I'm getting no hyperterminal response. I know the cable I made with the RS232 connector from sparkfun electronics is working. When I loopback the TX and RX I'm getting output in hyperterminal, but when connecting to the hard drive I get nothing. I tried switching RX and TX on the drive and still nothing. Took the PCB off of the hard drive entirely and nothing. Pressing CNTL+z through all of the above steps. Tried caps, no caps. The RS232 cable and hard drive share the ground as it's from the same power supply. I'm starting to think my hard drive is bricked for good. When hooked up to the hard drive the RX LED on the RS232 connector is on constantly, but when I perform the loopback test it only flashes when inputing something from the keyboard (as I would expect to happen). It does the same thing when PCB is on the hard drive or not....the LED constantly glows red while the send LED flashes with key strokes. This is probably something I should've posted before I got the parts for this repair (though this has been fun), but here's an audio file of the sound the hard drive is making upon power up. It's not the click of death, but it doesn't sound like the best noise a hard drive should make. Maybe a new PCB would do the trick??? Does anyone know what this sound is? I'm guessing I don't have either the BSY or 0 LBA error and that I should throw this HD in the garbage....though I would love to recover me some data. Audio - hard drive powering up Please turn speakers up fairly loud. Any help/info is greatly appreciated! ~eldrummair

First off, many thanks to Gradius for this amazing walkthrough. Kudos to you! I'm fairly certain the drive I'm working with is experiencing the BSY error as my friend's Seagate ST3500620AS (FW: SD25) is not showing up in BIOS. The serial number is 5QM0QGJ2 and on Seagate's site is shown to be one of the affected drives. There is no clicking or anything that would appear to be a mechanical failure and when attempting to mount the drive in Mac OS X I can see everything on it, but when attempting to copy any data I always get an error that the drive is "busy". So it would seem that the data is still there, but I just can't retrieve it. Seagate offers no help as this is as it's an OEM drive that my friend purchased through LaCie and LaCie has no idea what's going on so I'm left with attempting this tutorial to try and recover my friend's data. I have ordered the necessary parts and have the PC with a serial port running XP SP3 to attempt this, but my question is this (and pardon me if this is amateurish as I really don't know if this detail makes a difference or not regarding rebuilding the partition using hyperterminal)..... The drive's partition scheme is "Apple Partition Map". It was formatted for my friends iMac and now his important data is locked on the drive. Does the fact that the drive is formatted for Apple computers make any difference in the partition regeneration portion of this walkthrough? Would there be a different command that I would use because of this fact? If this question has been asked and answered previously in this thread my apologies as well, but it's a very very long thread and I haven't read through every page. Any input is greatly appreciated by me and my friend (that should've backed up his important data in the first place!). :-) ~eldrummair