lir3

Thanks for your comments. I wanted to take the risk and try another board, because the failure was during a storm. There was a slight chance that the damage was there even if nothing appeared as burned. You are right in that I did not detect the exact symptom, which now looks more like stuck heads. Anyway, I got back to corner 0 as I have restored the original ROM chip and board to the drive and it is not showing the flash boot checksum error and boot prompt anymore, just as it was before. The motor spins up and the drive makes like 12 kick noises and then the motor stops, but there is no output to the serial terminal and it does not respond to Ctrl-Z. That was the original symptom. I notice that if I isolate the hda and or motor pins, even the good drives with Firmware CC1H and CC1J do not work, do not respond to Ctrl-Z or anything. Do you know if this method of entering Diagnostic mode has been modified on recent firmware versions? I have read many of the pages in this forum now and it looks like for my drive, apart from sending it to DR places, which would cost a lot for having messed with the ROM, I will only have the crude freezing or tapping methods. Do you have a way to search within the topics or the forum? Thanks again.

Hi, I just joined the forum now. Thanks for the opportunity. I am trying to rescue data from a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11, 1.5TB with CC1H firmware. The problem started after a thunderstorm causing power blackout over last weekend. The drive would not be able to read sector #0. I swapped the controller card from a similar drive (everything matches including the Date and Site Codes, except for serial number) and then swapped the ROM chip. After that the drive is not seen at BIOS level (it does not seem to spin-up anymore). I am trying the serial port access by using the rs232 shifter SMD PRT-00449 and using power from the orange pin that also goes to the hard drive, so it feeds 3.3v. I read in the README 1st that this shifter requires 3v. But I get response from the drive and keyboard commands are taken. However, the response from the drive is like this: Notet Boot ROM 4.2 Copyright Seagate 2008 Serial FLASH boot code checksum failure! Boot Cmds: DS AP <addr> WT <data> RD GO TE BR <divisor> BT ? RET > If I enter CtrlZ it responds: Bad command: 0x1A0D > I basically cannot find a way to get into the F3 T mode. Can you please tell me if I am missing something? Note: I get the expected behavior (The F3 T> prompt from pressing CtrlZ) using the same setup and a good Seagate drive. Thanks.