jaclaz

I think there is a misunderstanding. Post a photo or a scan of the board (PCB). In any case, if you are trying with the head contacts, try with the motor contacts, see here: http://www.mapleleafmountain.com/seagatebrick.html jaclaz

HMMM, this must be the most foolish thing one can do: attempt a firmware replacement on defective hardware! (without asking for help before) NOW, you are ready? After having ALREADY put the drive in an unknown state by applying the firmware update? I was wrong , THIS is the most foolish thing, the good news are that you asked before attempting to do that. DO NOT EVEN THINK of doing this! Let's restart from the beginning, OK? Your DiamondMax 22 SATA 500 GB is - to all practical effects - a Seagate 7200.11, thus it can suffer as well from the same BSY or LBA0 problem, as well by a number of OTHER, UNRELATED problems. Now you should take some time reading the STICKIES: AFTER you have digested the info in them (please do take your time), read also this: (please do not tell us how you cannot see the images, we know that, they are lost forever, the only meaningful one, last one, shows that the drive has a BUSY green button lighted up, and the image on page__st__10 can be used as reference instead) I think we have NO way (anymore) to understand whether your drive is in LBA0 state, since this is done at boot, but maybe you can try it as well, what happens if you go into BIOS as soon as the PC boots? If the BIOS "sees" the drive BUT sees it as having 0 capacity, THEN in it is in LBA0 state. Let's first see if any of the two known problems exists (though I doubt it, since you somehow can "see" the disk). The attempts you made with recovery programs should hopefully NOT have caused any further damage. In ANY case, to attempt ANY recovery procedure you need another new, or DEFINITELY working Hard Disk size bigger than your "botched" 500 Gb (a 640 Gb would be perfect), ideally you should have TWO such devices, one to work on and one to restore the hopefully recovered data, but even one and some spare space on some other disk may do. Please do understand that I have not any interest in suggesting you to buy/procure such a new drive, I am telling you this because ANY serious attempt at recovery goes through a forensic sound or dd-like image of the disk. ANYTHING else, any program, any how to, any video on YouTube, any friend telling you, ANYTHING else suggesting to operate directly on the botched hard disk won't be supported, as it is likely to create more damages and worse than that may make the data (if recoverable) definitely UNrecoverable. jaclaz

Ideas are going to end soon. Are you trying insulating the head or the motor contacts? Whichever you are using now try with the OTHER set. Then try again, reading from here: Whatever contacts, are they "clean" and "springy", see here: jaclaz

Yep , a couple real ones : jaclaz

Yes (for Seagate), but they probably won't help you. Here: http://forum.hddguru.com/seagate-terminal-commands-t6411-40.html http://forum.hddguru.com/seagate-7200-terminal-commands-t11926.html http://files.hddguru.com/download/Datasheets/Seagate/Seagate%20Diagnostic%20RS-232%20Port/ This is "strange": When you enter the CTRL+Z you should be at: and NOT ALREADY at: (and if you are already at F3 2> there is no need to change to that level with /2 [ENTER]) Power off everything, remove the plastic card, power on, wait it spins or 30/60 seconds or more (to make sure it initializes "normally"), power off, reapply the plastic card, and retry. jaclaz

Try again from the beginning. Wait some time AFTER the F3 T>/2 BEFORE issuing the F3 2>Z. (30 seconds or 60 seconds may do ) jaclaz

With all due respect. , I cannot understand anything of your post. Is there a queston? Or an issue? Why has it been posted in General Discussion? Are you talking of this? http://windows7themes.net/how-to-check-mbr-for-virus-infection-via-mbrcheck.html It simply compares the current MBR (CODE part) checksum (SHA1) against an internal table of "standard" checksums. It is a mostly unuseful tool, in the sense that there are millions of machines around that don't have "standard" MBR code, like most OEM's with a recovery partition, then grub4dos, syslinux, gujin, mbldr and heaven only knows how many other boot.managers that have their own MBR code, published each in a zillion subsequent versions. Depending on the extents of the MBR code that it uses it may also give "false positives" (meaning "hacked MBR") on different languages of the same MS Operating systems, if it does the first 440 bytes, it includes the "text strings" that may change in different languages. So, it is ONLY useful if you know that you should have a "standard" MBR among those in the internal "table". Think of it as an AV product (but with no heuristics) it would need a very wide database of "MBR definitions", constantly updated, to become an useful tool, IMHO. jaclaz P.S.: TWEAKUI: http://windowsxp.mvps.org/tweakui.htm

I never boot in WinPE so I can't say for sure. Please note how that question was posted by Tripredacus and NOT by me. jaclaz

No need to be sorry , every place has it's queer things, but we do have a (most probably better BTW ) pasta and wine than you have, and we have it at every other corner and for a fraction of the price you pay it in "italian" restaurants (BTW here we call them simply restaurants ), so I think I'll live without accessible ispropyl alcohol.... jaclaz

Hmmm, quite rare to find people in a non Commercial environment using a DELL Server and Server 2003 Enterprise with network booting. jaclaz

JFYI, in Italy - as an example - isopropyl alcohol is VERY rare and in practice the ONLY way to get it (and not actually cheap €5 / 1 liter) is to get it from some specialized shop involved in tools and materials for restoration of wood and old furniture, and even the one that you can find is not "pure" (i.e. 100% isopropyl) but at 97% and "denaturated", anyway "good enough" for cleaning this kind of stuff . This is due to some tax/laws, if you want to sell this kind of alcohol you need a special license and need to hold a dedicated registry for it, in practice only wholesale and big chemical companies get (or can afford) this license. jaclaz

As for WinPE, I'm thinking Win PE 3.0 x64. Yep , but I seem not being able to find *any* reference to WinPE in CoffeeFiend's post either. BTW, and JFYI, WIM support was added very recently (today ) to Win7PE, so it is fairly possible to add to WinPE as well, though cannot say about x64: http://reboot.pro/9246/ http://reboot.pro/files/file/39-wmisupportscript/ jaclaz

Good. I guess we can change/semplify it to: robocopy "%DPMSource%" "%USB_drive%\DPM\%DPMname%" %roboparametermirror% Now let's assume that you have a plain text file like the following list.txt: ::Hello I am a senseless header, here only to show how you can skip lines in a FOR /F loop C:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Volumes\ShadowCopy\vol_9edf29cf-c89a-4fe5-97d6-7c9ce70c13b0 And a batch file: @ECHO OFF SETLOCAL ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION SET USB_drive=U: SET roboparametermirror=/E /ZB /MIR /XD "System Volume Information" /XF "*.mp*" "*.avi" "*.mkv" "*.wm*" "*.m4*" /LOG+:"%LOG%" /TEE /NP FOR /F "skip=1 tokens=* delims=" %%A IN (list.txt) DO ( SET DPMSource=%%A SET DPMName=%%~nA ECHO robocopy "!DPMSource!" "%USB_drive%\DPM\!DPMname!" %roboparametermirror% ) What happens? What happens when you add some more source directories to list .txt and re-run the batch? jaclaz

Check your time service notifying settings: jaclaz

WHICH WinPE? jaclaz

Does the wording of my post leave any doubts about that? I'll try again: DO NOT use "windows alcohol". The additives in it will leave traces. DO NOT use acetone or other similar solvents. Unless you want to melt some plastic. You should use isopropyl alcohol ONLY. IF you don't have the above, use pure ethilic alcohol (the one used to produce alcoholic beverages/liquors, like 90% or 95%) IF you don't have the above, use "medical" alcohol, BUT be very careful to NOT leave any traces ("medical alcohol" is the above BUT a form of "denaturated" with some additives, including the "red/rose colour "mwethylviolet" or similar): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatured_alcohol these additives may leave residual traces IF you don't have any of the above leave the lense dirty or clean it "dry" with a brush or similar. BTW, just as for similar cleaning chores, Vodka is not that bad, either. jaclaz

IMHO in order to learn you need to start from the bottom and go up (as opposed to from the top and going down). Say that you have ONLY contents oof a single folder to copy over (le'ts use this as an example): C:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Volumes\ShadowCopy\vol_9edf29cf-c89a-4fe5-97d6-7c9ce70c13b0 WHICH robocopy command line would you use? jaclaz

Yes, if you read the already given thread: and this one: You may get some ideas/data/methods/tools. jaclaz

Isopropyl is the best. "medical" (ethilic) alcohol may leave some traces, better NOT use it. "windows" alcohol is actually a mix of ethilic alcohol with some other detergent: DO NOT use it pure ethilic alcohol (the one used to produce alcoholic beverages/liquors, like 90% or 95%) will do. jaclaz

Are you using *anything* in "C:\Program Files"? Then the whatever you are using does not support spaces in paths. Or you supplied a path with spaces in it as a parameter without enclosing it in double quotes. jaclaz

I am not sure to understand the question. With the above command line you are using a "custom" string which is valid only for English systems BTW, it is perfectly possible that you have some other string in there if you deal with an "international" environment. Also, there may be more than one "Local area connection", like "Local are connection 2", etc. If you are sure about current name and are on English systems you can use netsh, see: http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/rename-network-connection-t2439607.html http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/nic-enumeration-t3142792.html I would rather use WMI (or WMIC) to get the info first, like: wmic nic get netconnectionID wmic path Win32_networkadapterconfiguration where "IPENABLED=TRUE" get Caption,SettingID /format:csv A VBS: http://forums.techarena.in/operating-systems/1206981.htm jaclaz

And it can be done also in batch through WMIC. WMIC SystemEnclosure GET ChassisTypes WMIC ComputerSystem GET PCSystemType Possibly "PortableBattery" instead of "Battery" is more suited. jaclaz

Related (loosely) or UNrelated : http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=23292 jaclaz

Really nice. A good example of lateral thinking. jaclaz

Tried with a more "orthodox" image, see attached HTML PTVIEW. The third partition, exactly 1 cylinder in size, and default 255/63 HS geometry is FAT12 (and keeps the 01 Partition Type). Actually I made this by re-formatting the partition (already formatted as NTFS) in Explorer. The actual "virtual device" has anyway an odd number of sectors , though . The number of "reserved sectors" were made to 8 this time. jaclaz PTVIEW.html