opiuman

No offense taken, you're the expert here so I respect your opinion. Sorry I meant that I didn't actually boot up from the bad drive itself, booted up from a good drive and using the bad drive just to see if I can see it. I'll follow your advice and see what I can do. Thanks for everyones help.

Alright so I got everything set up however right when I did CTRL+Z I got to F3 T> WITHOUT disconnecting the head or motor contacts which is supposed to indicate my drive isn't actually suffering from the problem. This is when I got really confused and put it back into my computer and now it shows up in BIOS and Windows Explorer but causes the computer to take an additional minute to start Windows. AND when I try to access the drive in Windows Explorers it hangs for quite awhile with the progress bar slowly filling with green but never completing. At this point I can see SOME to ALL files but as soon as I try to access any of them it takes awhile and seems to never do anything. Not sure what's going on anymore. Drive spins up fine, no odd noises. EDIT: Ugh, managed to get it to boot and be seen in Ubuntu and I can navigate the drive fine and see files but can't play or read or copy anything. I think I'm SOL on this one.

Think Octopus : jaclaz LOL didn't think of that, would make life easier to get all 3 clamped together at a single point. I was seriously thinking of putting them in series or something EDIT: Really meant 4, forgot about the black GND from the PSU powering the hard drive

It is better to order from the recommended guide, but seems that you got the hang of it http://www.mapleleafmountain.com/seagatebrick.html I saw that guide but didn't want to go too crazy with using the 4 pin fan power for the adapter and decided to opt for the simpler battery instead. Gonna follow the original pretty closely except for connecting the - terminal of battery to the HD GND as well. I ordered a few other parts to come later in case the first try doesn't work. Gonna just solder the headers into the slots so i can just use jumpers with all of them. That would be FGA #2 http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/147532-fga-for-the-seagate-720011-drives/ Oh yea I knew that, I guess its just still surprises me that it's such a terrible response from Seagate.

Hello all, wow all I have to say is what a thread... mine just failed last night with BSY I believe since nothing in BIOS and the OS seems to hang for quite awhile booting up and logging on. Nothing like that when I remove the problem drive. Just ordered my parts from the first post and read at least most of the stuff in the other topics. Doesn't seem too complicated except for the picture in the first post shows the - of the 3v battery connected to the GND of the adapter when it should ALSO be connected to GND of the HD too right according to #7 of the Read Me First sticky right? Other than that it looks pretty simple battery + side to the adapter VCC, RX to TX and vice versa, - and HD GND to adapter GND and of course the RS232 into the computer, am I missing anything? Will post again when the parts arrive. EDIT: Speaking of which Seagate totally told me my drive wasn't affected even though it was! It's the Maxtor version but still it clearly has the corresponding Seagate version in the affected list :|