catalins

That is strange... There was no reports of any problems with SD1A here. Can you give some links? http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=seagate+sd1a+hdd+brick&meta= First page and it's enough to get the picture BTW, it may be that only some models are affected by the SD1A issue, however on the Seagate official page there's still SD1A available for other models: http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207951 For my drive, they have SD1B now. cheers ...

Hi all, Few days ago I managed to fix my Seagate 7200.11 ST3640323AS SD13 HDD that was "dead" since 1.5 years ago, after exactly one year of moderate usage. It took me a lot of time to find exactly what the issue was, but after I found this forum, it all became clearer. Symptoms on my HDD: - not visible on BIOS - comp will not boot with this drive connected - on powering up the drive (no matter if connected to SATA cable or not) it would spin up for 3-5 seconds, make some sounds as if searching on drive surface for 1 sec, then spin down in 3-4 sec. Then the same over and over again - spin up, make some small sounds and spin down. - no other sounds or noises except the above. I used a Nokia CA-42 cheap clone data cable with 6 wires in it. I checked the cable before cutting it and the loopback test went ok, using the normal drivers it came with, then after cutting I have identified the wires by checking the image on http://buffalo.nas-central.org/wiki/File:CA-42_DKU-5_pinout.jpg or http://pinouts.ru/CellularPhones-Nokia/nokia_pop_pinout.shtml TX and RX were easy to find, however the GND was not pin8 (Data GND - USB GND), since the voltage difference to RX and TX was only 1 V, instead, I found the useful GND to be pin2 (Charger ground). Using this one, I had 3.3 V difference with RX and TX. Next, more testing to see if data went through when using HyperTerminal and a voltmeter - voltage fluctuating slightly on the RX line when keeping a key pressed all times. Loopback test again and all went ok. Finally, connecting all to the HDD jumper pins (including the GND from CA-42 cable), disconnecting the Motor from board and using all commands and instructions as in the tutorial from first page. Last line was "Zone re-format was skipped." as other users encountered, however this is not an issue, after connecting the HDD to SATA and power, all files were present and there's no other issue with the drive. Still have to update the firmware to SD1B that I see Seagate was kind enough to prepared for us BTW, I read from many sources that SD1A causes the same issue at some point in time, so it would be wise to update to last version. However, did any of you encountered issues on SD1B ? I also saw some other users had the same symptoms like me but none managed to fix their drives. Well, it's possible if you take some time to read and understand the READ_ME_FIRST + FGA. Also some basic technical knowledge is useful. MANY THANKS to everyone who contributed their time and effort to help us all.