I report a successful unbricking operation of my Seagate 7200.11 HDD. Many thanks to Jaclaz, Videoripper and all others on this forum, whose posts guided me. The procedure went off like a charm. At present I am backing up the data on a USB hard disk. I want to share some of my learnings below, with a disclaimer that these worked for me -- not necessary that the same will work for you. I used a Nokia CA-45 (not CA-42) cable. 3 wires inside. Made in China. USB powered i.e. no need to attach an external battery. If you do not want to hassle yourself by having AA batteries stuck together to power the USB-serial converted, you should go to a phone accessory shop with your laptop. Any cable which is detected when USB plug is inserted (without the phone attached at the other end) is a reasonable bet. I tried 15 odd cables (all CA-42s) before I got the USB powered one. While not necessary, it helps to upfront identify GND, RX, TX on the cable (varies from cable to cable so no rules here -- some investigative work needed) as well as on the drive (please see recent posts by Videoripper and Jaclaz, which are very clear) so that the initial connection itself is correct. Grounding : I connected the GND of Nokia cable to the GND on the HDD. The HDD was powered by an external SATA power adapter. That had a different GND. I took my chances by not connecting that GND to the HDD / Cable GND. Did not face any problems. Loopback : I did the loop back test on the Nokia CA-45 cable by setting up HT (windows XP home) and connecting the RX / TX cables. What you type appears on the screen only ONCE. If you do not connect RX and TX cables then the text you type does not appear on screen and the screen remains blank. This confused me initially because I was looking at double text appearing. But the cables worked perfectly and when it was connected to the HDD, I could see, what I was typing in the HTT. I covered the ‘head contact’ with a piece of paper and not the ‘motor contact’. The PCB was attached to the HDD throughout the process. 3 screws close to the motor contact were fully tightened from beginning. There is a mention in some posts to keep the other 3 screws loose. I learnt that I can keep only 2 screws loose in place. The third small one which is very close to the head contact, cannot be even positioned because the thick paper covers the threaded hole. I put this 6th screw in position only after I pulled the paper out midway during the process. I found useful two rounds of practice of pulling the paper with no power and then attaching the single screw while trying not to touch the PCB. Lastly, Seagate’s authorised RMA service (outsourced in India) was neither aware of the BSY issue nor were they prepared to help out by trying to remedy. They offered to just replace the HDD. When I called the Singapore helpdesk, a very polite and helpful representative asked questions, concluded that this is a BSY issue and offered to get the HDD picked up from my residence, arrange for firmware upgrades at their service center located in Southern India and return the repaired HDD (not another replacement) to my residence. I did not select this option because of data privacy issue as well as the fact that I did not want to risk the transit physical damage possibility. Because of this acceptance of responsibility by Seagate and their gesture of making an offer to take care of the matter at no cost to me, I will continue to be a Seagate customer! I am also planning to upgrade the firmware using the ISO file from Seagate website. I am aware that some people have had issues with the SD1A version. Is that now corrected by Seagate? Thanks CarterinCanada for this tip. Will remember.Regards GAG