mundy5

Sebastian, can you take a picture of the other side of the cable? You mean the side with the cables, opposite to the side with the USB port? You need a close picture, right? no, I need a picture of the other side of the board that attached to the USB port.

Sebastian, can you take a picture of the other side of the cable?

Sebastian, Rather than sending you a cable that works, let's work through your situation. Since you said that you have 5 CA-42 cables, we only need to get one of them to work. Look at the picture above of the CA-42 USB side. If you use something sharp to separate the plastic cover, you should see the wires soldered on the chip. Look for the ones that match the position of the 3 wires above. Those are the 3 wires you need. If you look carefully at the picture, you can see that the blue and white wires are near the top of the chip (the white is to the right of the blue) and the black is at the bottom. Look for the wires that correspond to those positions in your cable. By the way, the above photos are from CA-42 cables made in china. I believe the ones made in Thailand are wrapped in some type of hard to remove plastic shrink wrap. Take a picture of your chip once you open up the USB side and post it. We'll walk you through it.

yes! great news! now do as VideoRipper says

They will ask you when you begin the process of a warranty return on the website. One of the fields is the SeaTools Test code.

There are already videos on youtube. don't put more time into this unnecessarily

...and that's what you're doing wrong. Since the firmware is stored on the platters, once you apply power to the drive the firmware is loaded (and fails), resulting in a busy state. The trick is to only access the controler, before it is even able to load the firmware and this is done by temporary disabling the drive motor (by separating it from the PCB). +1 with Peter. You are doing it backwards and that is why you are getting the error messages. As Peter said, you need to put in the separator, screw in the 3 torx screws on the other side and then plug in the sata power. You need to follow the tutorial exactly in its proper order. You cannot mess with things and expect it to work properly. hope you get it working.

I got a message like this in my attempt when I failed to wait until the hdd has stopped spinning at the very beginning. For me, when I first plug in the hdd, it would power up and start spinning. After about 3-5 seconds, it would stop spinning. Then I would start the hyperterminal and go through the process. If I started it before it stopped spinning, I'd get this error message. So try that. You will not be successful at updating the firmware in this state.

@Nc1224 see the post below by Tracy on p. 117. Notice the picture. Look carefully at the 3 wires colored black, white, and blue. Notice that the black wire is soldered on the back of the board, this is your GRN. Look for the same position on yours. it might be a different color wire. Likewise, notice the white is at the top right (not on the edge of the board) and the blue is at the top of the edge. Those are the 2 positions you want to look for in your CA-42 board. Again, your wire colors might be different but these two wire positions are your TX and RX wires. btw, no need for power since this cable gets its power from the USB port. But make sure it is a powered USB port, not part of some hub!

Nc1224, It's not the colors of the wires so much as how it is connected to the USB end of it. If you use a flat head screwdriver you should be able to separate the plastic cover and you'll see usually only 3 of the wires connected to the board. From there you can then localize what the 3 wires can be, GRN, TX, RX. I believe that if you connect the TX and RX together you will get a null modem and your terminal should start to echo whatever you type. That leaves the 3rd wire as GRN. I saw pictures of them before but I can't find them now. Hope this helps. I'll try to find a pic probably in this thread.

JRFreeman, it sounds like your drive was not fully recovered. Either you can run it through again or return it to seagate for an exchange. everyone who was able to go through the process successfully as outlined here was able to read and use the hdd normally. so something did not go right with your process or you have more issues with your hdd than the ones listed in this thread. please let us know if it works the 2nd time.

@jengitsme My experience confirms yours with i365. They do not appear to be interested in fixing the problem anymore. I ended up having to fix it myself, backed it up and then sent it in for exchange with Seagate since it also failed the short DST test. I'm very disappointed in i365 for their lack of desire to help. They only want money. @valkyrio What you said might have been true say 1 year ago but now the standard line is that the flashing of new firmware did not take place, there is nothing they can do except to try to recover the data costing us $700. I actually sent an email to my i365 agent shaming him and his tech for not doing their jobs knowing full well that this is a fixable problem without having to go to data recovery. anyway, enough i365 bashing for the day.

Yes, b/c it is a firmware issue, not a capacity issue.

Well you can do one of two or both. 1. Go through the process again hopefully this time, not getting any weird Greek letters. 2. Go ahead and plug it into the computer to see if it is recognized. At this point, I do not see any of these 2 approaches as damaging your hdd, IMHO. I'd personally go for #1 just to make sure that everything worked properly.

ShanePierce, good to read of your successful unbricking!

Or another easy solution for me was to use the CA-42 Nokia cable method. It works great and you can use any computer since it uses usb as an interface. It's also cheaper for me. it cost me ~$4.

The only way to know for sure whether it is fried or not is to use a working usb or rs232 converter to check. you would need to obtain another one. Make sure that it is working currently to determine whether it is your converter that somehow got ruined.

@VideoRipper, I had the exact same model # and firmware version as yours. I am hoping that the exchanged drive will not be the same firmware. @ingenious, did you remove the business card and completely reattach the pcb while the power is still plugged into the hdd? I do not recall getting any errors after I reattached the pcb properly.

If you are in level 1, you need to type /T to get to the lower level. Try the whole process again. I do not understand what you mean by "and the whole shebang, but no response" do you mean by this that when you start over by inserting the card between the pcb and the motor connection etc? Or do you mean after N1 you get no response? Try the steps again and be meticulous. As Gradius2 warned us, it is very easy to ruin the hdd so please be very careful and follow exactly what he says. Also, after you unplugged and plugged it back in, did you hit ctrl-z like it says in the instructions?

actually, by failing the short DST you already have justification to get a swap. that is what I did. It does not need to brick. You need to copy that code that Seatools gave you ("Your SeaTools Test Code: A7E7D56A") and go to their website and request an RMA # under the warranty link. they will ask you for the code from the seatools test. then everything else is self explanatory and you'll get a replacement hdd.

@chinbender, I've had success using iso recorder found here: http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm when it comes to burning iso image into a CD-R. @Videoripper, your error messages are basically identical to the ones I had. I sent it back for an exchange after I backed up everything. Mine ended up running so slow because of all these read errors, and I read somewhere that the short DST detects errors in the pcb and/or electronics portion while the long DST tests the physical disk itself. Anyway, I'd recommend that you get your replaced via warranty if you can. My HD was running very slow.

I hope that you are following the steps exactly. After spin down, you need to remove the paper and reconnect the pcb and screw down the torx screws. then go onto the next steps. If you want to send it for recovery, it'll cost you a lot.

so after it spins down, you can now start the terminal process by hitting ctrl-z, etc. my hdd would give me an error message if I tried to hit ctrl-z before it finished its boot process. so wait 35 sec and go through the process of ctrl-z, Z etc.

@videoripper, My experience with i365 here in the states has been the same. They gave me the same story of how my hdd has read errors. Now to be fair, after I unbricked the hdd and backed up everything, I ran the seatools tests on it and it said that it failed the short DST. So I am not doubting their analysis. In fact, I have sent mine back to get it replaced after everything was backed up. What I am upset about is that they did not unbrick it for me so I had to do it myself to retrieve the data. They wanted me to pay them $700 to get the data back which for me cost $8.35 to get the screw driver and the CA-42 cable. Unfortunate. So I recommend that you run the seatools for Dos on your hdd and run the short DST. See what it says. @aftrshock, In my experience, here is what you are not doing. 1. Open up your hyperterminal and have it ready to go. 2. connect the SATA power to your hdd and wait until everything is silent on the hdd. This usually took me about 30 or more secs. 3. Then connect the RS232 or USB cable to your computer. 4. Run the commands on hyperterminal. In my experience, if I ran the commands while the hdd was booting on, it gave me the error message.

@jaclaz hp is notorious for crippling original bios menus. I know what I speak of since I also own an hp from back in 99. It still runs but the bios stinks like no other. @chinbender unless hp has come out with their own updated firmware, i would not use seagates. hp and other oems use their own version of the firmware and you very well might brick it if you try using seagates. as i said earlier, hp is notorious for crippling stuff possibly to keep their csr and tech support from having to fix people's mistakes in configuring this stuff. regardless, the bios you get from buying your own motherboards is far superior. never again will i buy an oem computer and deal with the limitations there.