BlouBul

See FGA . Pay special attention to the link given in Point 6.

That is strange Did you set up your HyperTerminal correctly? Did you do a loopback test?

Where did you get your original SD1A from? The very first version of SD1A caused similar problems. See if anything here helps. Latest version of SD1A is here. It seems like the latest SD1A will fix the problem. http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1525155

You did not do anything terribly wrong (except not backing up before you did the Firmware update ) That is normally not a problem, but as can be seen here, sometimes the unexpected happens. The trying to undo the updates afterwards also didn't help. I think the only one that might be able to get you out of this mess is jaclaz. Since this is not totally part of this thread, start a new thread, explaining everything again, and let's hope he can work his magic and help you out of this mess.

Hi Spadge, Welcome to MSFN We would probably be able to offer more help if you tell us exactly how you managed to update your firmware to SD1A. You are not suppose to be able to do that when you have the BSY bug. Was your drive recognised in BIOS before you tried your upgrade? This fix might still be able to fix your drive (depending on what you commited before )The more info you give, the better.

There is no luck involved. It is very straightforward. Good Luck is defined as Did you not learn after the first brick to update your firmware and to back up your data? Best case is to read the stickies and repair both for a once of purchase of under $20 It is a reliable product, once you update the firmware and not ignore the fact that some of your previous disks were bricked because you did not upgrade the firmware. Good luck to you We can see that. Now calm down, read the stickies, and if you need help to fix your two bricks without any external luck required, feel free to ask specific questions and we will try to help you. Good Luck

Hi JorgeA, Just got home now. Only a week at the sunny coasts this year . Have to go to a family gathering inland during the Christmas period I do not think faster hardware will come close to the Word 2000 times. So option 2 is not really an option to solve this problem. I suspect there is something intrinsically in Word 2007 that clashes with your type of files. I wonder if Word 2010 will be better? Maybe you can download a trial and sees if it is. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/try/try-office-2010-FX101868838.aspx?WT.mc_id=mscom_enus_bnr_tryq2 Otherwise, stick with Clippy

Also see FGA #5

Hi CylonWolf, Welcome back! No problem to do the fix even on a drive that is not bricked. It just resets the settings to factory default (and thereby clearing the error that caused it to brick). Good luck!

Since our tests in the previous thread showed hardly any difference in the opening times between the two formats, I do not think that got anything to do with it. I think it is more an intrinsic property in the way the different versions of Word opens a file. We will confirm that when we open the open the .doc file in Word 2000. If you want to, you can also open the .docx file in Word 2000 (with a suitable converter plugin), but I do not think there will be a significent difference.

Very interesting. The opening document in warm start takes 5x the time in 2007 than in 2000! If we take our times it is about 7x (30sec vs 210sec). I still think there is now real functionality that will be lost if you run Office 2007 with Word 2000

No Prob, See you then (and good luck with the end-of-the-year-rush)

If that computer is connected to the internet, you can try to setup your outlook account by copying the account settings in your other computer. That will also help to show you that it is not really that difficult The hdd is unfortunately too small to test the image, but big enough to do quite a few useful tests (you can always image and restore that drive to practice) Now let's fix it that I can start relaxing

If you use one of those USB to TTL converters suggested, the whole process is a lot easier (especially the finding the specific converter part). Then you can skip the whole build your own converter part, since you would have bought a pre-build converter (See also the Read-me-first#10) You are, off course, welcome to do it any way you want, but both ways will work.

What about uninstalling Word 2007 and installing Word 2000 on that machine? That might be an interesting experiment since the opening times is about the same as your other pc. That will also tell you if anything serious will go wrong. What size hdd does that machine have? Thanks I will enjoy my holiday, but will still try to pop in for a couple of minutes when I get a chance to see if we can cook up something to solve your problem (I can't relax if there are still unsolved problems)

I think the problem was that ol Seagate was under a bit of pressure to release SD1A before it was properly tested. That very first version (Jan 2009) was known to cause problems. They pulled it very quickly and released a new SD1A about a week later that worked well.

That is strange... There was no reports of any problems with SD1A here. Can you give some links? Try here http://tinyurl.com/296l2sn http://www.rhydolabz.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=304 http://cgi.ebay.in/CP2102-USB-TTL-RS232-Serial-Port-Converter-Transceiver-/230308271855 http://www.nex-robotics.com/products/usb-and-ethernet-interfacing/usb-to-serial-ttl-cmos-logic.html

Hi JorgeA, Sorry for the late reply. My December (Read Summer ) holidays started on Friday and the whole process of moving the whole family to the nice sunny coasts of South Africa started . We just arrived and I managed to find an internet connection (not the fastest, but workable). I'll try to pop in a couple of times. If I do not reply too often it means the weather is still good. Anyway, I think it creates an image of your system (or just track the changes) and if you want to change back it just either restores the image or undo the changes. It still works from your current registry, so two versions of the same program will still confuse it (so I am not too surprised at the slow result). A better option if you want to use try&decide is to uninstall Word and reinstall it. Since you have a full image of your computer anyway, you can even do it without try&decide. That is strange 50GB of data missing with everything still there? Not sure about that one. Did it maybe emptied your recycle bin? You know what I think, just do it (you have a full image). But understanding your unwillingness to muck with a working system, that would be a good idea. You do not need an identical drive for that. Any old drive would work for that (bigger than 20 gb). If you get a drive bigger than 500 GB, you can test your image there .A reinstall on an empty drive will also show you that a reformat and reinstall is not so difficult. Without laying out money for a new internal hdd to do the test on, I wonder if we cannot create a new partition (say 50 GB) on your current hdd, make that partition active and install a fresh system there (maybe dual boot)? Does anyone know of specific dangers involved in that?

From your link:

With Try and decide (or your image), you can get your settings easy back. The experiment might work better with only one Word installed. The two versions of the same program might confuse the living daylights out of your computer. See here to save your settings.

Hi JorgeA, I think you will have less problems if you uninstall Word 2007 first, and then reinstall it. With both try and decide and a full backup, you can't go too far wrong, but multiple instances of Word will confuse your system more than one instance.

I think that is a good idea Remember to uninstall Word 2007 first.

Hi JorgeA, Ok, I was not thinking of installing 2 versions of the same program (Office 2007 without Word 2007 with Word 2000, so just one version of Word). Although reading through your links (I couldn't access the middle two from http://uksbsguy.com, maybe the site was down), it doesn't seem so complicated (just read the fine print and check to keep the old version). If you really want both Word versions you can do that. There is also a little registry hack to prevent Word from making each version the default if you have both versions of Word installed (which might seem terrifying to you, but it is very well documented and is just a case of Monkey See, Monkey Do ) Anyway, installing Word 2000 was the last option on the list (although that gave fantastic results ). If repair Office didn't help, try uninstalling Word 2007 only and reinstalling after reboot Word 2007 again. Another safe, but slightly more complicated option to try after that (not that complicated but safer to do after your image is finished) is to uninstall Office 2007 and reinstall Office 2007. I know you will now throw your hands up in horror and complain that you then have to resetup Outlook Here is a quick test to see if you will be able to do that. Try adding an e-mail account to your outlook. Go to account settings (try to edit your current mail account settings to get the values (do not save or change anything there). Then create a new second account with the same settings. If it work there, it will work in a new setup as well. This might not be necessary, but is good thing to know you can do it if you have to After all those and as a last option, we can try the word 2000 after removing Word 2007. I think normal compression will also back up all the unused space into a very small portion, where uncompressed will show huge amounts of nothing

This the FAQ sticky, I guess you are talking about the FGA http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/fga-not-faq.html Did you read the recommended guide by CarterinCanada? That is the more difficult way (to put the whole pcb back with power on ), but glad it worked

I just check on my installation (you can easy check with add-remove programs (or the shortcut I gave in my previous link, Appwiz.cpl,) then select office, change, add-remove components. There you will see a little hdd with a down arrow next to it next to each program. If you click on the down arrow next to the hdd, you can choose between install, run on first use or do not install (at least on my Office 2010) I think Office 2000 was the same. You can safely test it now and just cancel if you do not want to apply the changes. That way you can also safely uninstall Word 2007 only (if it is still necessary after the other steps) It should take you less than five minutes: input display name, username and password incoming mail server (pop3.XYZ.com), outgoing mailserver (smtp.XYZ.com), check remember password and Voila! You're finished! Really not difficult OK good luck (and you still have a full image if you do something wrong, so do not worry too much )