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Ah, the venerable Jaclaz answers! Thank you for your answer and the humorous analogy that I am attempting to treat an illness in a totally unrelated, unconnected, uninformed, unhelpful, and unrealistic manner (!). That's a bummer. Any idea why the partition info is completely lost - I am wondering if trying to recreate the partition would at least allow me to try to recover the data that is on it as the data recovery tools I am using now are all stuck at even finding a partition.......

Sooo...... two days ago, my seemingly fully functional Seagate ST1000DM003 (firmware: CC47, date: 14076) drive decided it was no longer functional. Pertinent data: 1) recognized in BIOS upon bootup, but with SMART error. 2) CrystalDiskInfo cannot read SMART info 3) Windows Disk Manager recognizes the drive and wants to initialize it (uhh..no!) 4) Data recovery software (e.g. GetDataBack NTFS) recognizes the drive but cannot read (a bunch of LBA access errors) A couple of years ago, my dad's HP computer died - it had one of the Seagate 7200.xx drives with the known problems. I had created my own serial-USB connector cable from the CA-42 cable and successfully resurrected his drive (which is still working fine today). Soooo.. I thought... *maybe* there would be a way to resurrect this drive, at least enough to get data off. Let me say that I do have a mirrored NAS plus an external 2TB as redundant backups of important stuff, so while this isn't a "oh, I lost all my pictures and videos of my beautiful children for the last 10years <sniff>" story, there was stuff on here I wanted, but not super essential critical (enough adjectives for ya'? ). I decided to pull out my CA-42 cable, pulled hyperterminal from an XP VM onto my Windows 7 machine, installed some PL2303-GPS drivers (many others didn't work) and hooked things up. Current situation: If I just plug in a SATA power connector to the drive, it does *not* automatically spinup. If I additionally hookup the CA42 cable, open up hyperterminal (38400,8,n,1,n) and type Ctrl-z, the drive spins up. If I type Ctrl-C (supposedly a spin down/reinitialize command), the drive spins down. I never see a prompt in the hyperterminal window That's it. I can endlessly spin up and spin down with those commands, but I see nothing in response in the hyperterminal window. (Loopback test using Terminal is fine) I've tried sliding in some paper to block the PCB-drive connectors (not the 3 motor connections), but that doesn't seem to do anything. So, I'm curious if any of the previous gathered knowledge regarding Seagate firmware problems, LBA/BSY issues and such would be applicable in this situation.......or not. I haven't tried any of the PCB pin shorting described on this forum as my particular drive has not been mentioned....nor do I add any external power to my CA-42 cable, just plugged into a USB port. Thoughts?