I also have a Seagate from a customer, who was bricked up. I read the tutorial on the first page and also the tutorial from Mapleleafmountain. I used an Sparkin RS232 adapter and installed it as told on the tutorial. The loopback worked fine but at first i had no connection to the drive. Changing wires etc, did not work out and finally i founded the first help guide where was told about the 3.3v and 5v. On Sparkfun site i found information about voltage you connect on VCC. 5V input is 5v output, 3.3v input is 3.3v output. Somewhere else was written that the drive only worked by 3.3v and i changed the voltage to 3.3v with a external variable supply. In the tutorial of Mapleleafmountain was told to use the power supply of a computer with 5v output (red and black wire). After changing all this, the terminal was putting out strange symbols like smyley's and other things but was not responding at Control-z. In the "read-me-first" tutorial was something written about grounding all ground-wires together but it was a very small text about it. For some strange reason i went in the reply's to the last 4 pages and there was a remark about, why the groundings were not displayd at the photo's but only the connections rx, tx ,VCC, ground and the RS232 adapter. This person was answered by someone who told, a lot of people sended reply's with problems about the terminal and no connection to the disk. He came with a fact that not grounding all grounds together at one point, the connection should not work. Connect them all should make the connection to the drive work fine. So i changed my settings and putted the grounds together and yes, the connection did work. Unbricking the drive was easy in my case from the moment i changed the groundings. At this very moment i am coppying the data to a different drive (wd). So, for me worked this: Folow the fix explained on first page but also connect all grounds together to one place. This grounds includes: -Power (from power supply or battery) for RS232 adapter -Power to hard disk (i used the black wire ground from the diskette connection) -Ground pin on hard drive (2e pin from left) Maybe it is a good idea for the autors of this fix to explicit mention the ground connections to be made. It should make a very difference in fixing problems.(less posts) Thank you for posting the fix. My client would have lost lots of data.