blazindave

Question: How do you know if you have the BSY error? (Other than just the fact that it's not recognized by BIOS) I have a different model Seagate, it's a ST9500420AS, that my BIOS won't recognize. I actually bought an identical drive, swapped the PCB boards hoping that would work, but didn't. I tried swapping the platters, and that didn't work. Swapped them back, so now I have my original drive, in it's original non-working condition, as well as a "new" (used) drive, that doesn't appear to work either. Unfortunately I can't really return the drive since I've taken it apart. Now neither drive gets recognized in the BIOS Hard Disk Diagnostic. Each drive spins up, and the drive heads come in maybe 1/3 the radius of the platters, then they go back out, and repeat the in/out cycle a few times. So mechanically, they seem to be working, but the drives just aren't recognized. One set of platters has all my data on it, one should be clean. I just want to get my data back, preferably without paying a recovery service lots of money. Can someone make a reasonable estimate that a company would charge to recover data from a 500 GB hard drive that's maybe half-way full? Being that this is a different drive model than the original topic, I'm wondering if the "stuck in BSY state" even could apply to me or if it's likely something else? I'd prefer to know that I'm having this same error condition before attempting the RS232 to TTL stuff. How do people judge that they have a BSY error? Just knowing that it is common for their specific drive, combined with the fact that their BIOS doesn't recognize it? Can you do the RS232 to TTL board and get diagnostic info from the drive to indicate BSY or some other error mode? Is there a comprehensive document that indicates which commands/parameters can be communicated to/from the drive via this method? Thanks!