There are a lot of misunderstandings going on on this topic, your question may be the occasion to attempt clearing some of them. This thread and the nice page by CarterinCanada: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...807&st=1232 http://www.mapleleafmountain.com/seagatebrick.html and various similar hints/guides linked to or various information posted on the present thread, are aimed to recover or "debrick" a specific Seagate series drive suffering from the problem initially explained in this same thread (links given in this post): http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...807&st=1589 THIS problem may appear with two different symptoms: 0 LBA or BSY state. There may be tens or maybe hundreds of different problems leading to the same symptoms. Moreover several people with a failed or failing drive come here thinking this represents a miracle cure for any desease. (even if Symptoms are different) It is NOT. There are NO reports of drives suffering from THIS problem, to which THESE remedies were PROPERLY applied, using PROPER interfaces/cabling/power supplies, PROPERLY connected, which were not fully and integrally recovered. There is NO rational reason to presume that once THIS problem has been resolved and the PROPER firmware upgrade has been applied, the drive is not anymore dependable: it is EXACTLY as DEPENDABLE as any other Seagate Hard disk of the same series that was NOT affected by the problem. Whether this particular series of drive is more or less dependable than series X of manufacturer Y is higly debatable, there are NO publicly available extensive studies in this direction, and anyway by the time (exception made for early failures) the data would be available, a new (or more than one) series will be available and common, both from Seagate and from manufacturer Y. Borrowing the words Peter Gutmann used to describe the misunderstandings about his reknown paper: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html this thread and the info within it has been sometimes interpreted/used more as: If the problem is THIS one, the "cure" does work, if the problem is not exactly THIS one, who knows? jaclaz so is there a surefire way of finding out if this is my problem. it seems sort of suss that my hd just happens to be same firmware and drive model, serial no's as everybody else here. i tried victoria, did a pci scan and clicked on the drive and got an error. don't think the busy light was on though:( what i am wondering though should i be able to hear or feel the hard disk working when i plug it in? even for a few seconds? just gonna read some of them links you posted to see if anything new pops up.