bobseag

jaclaz, Thanks to you and other contributors for this thread. After having problems with a UBS/serial/TTL device, I returned it and received a new one. The loopback test that previously wasn't working (due to a faulty device) worked right away. I was able to recieve the short string of info from the drive that confirmed the existence of the BSY issue, then set to follow the steps in your process to recover the drive. In about 10 minutes the drive was recovered and my data is now safely backed up on another drive. Many, many thanks for the help. Cheers, Bob

How I wish I had a drawer full of cables, old drive, boards, etc. I just moved countries and did a big cleanout, bringing only two computers and a few DVI cables with me. Ugh. The driver/OS issue is something I've tested a bit. I've tested on a WinXP system with one set of drivers (for XP) and on a Windows 7 64bit system with two different versions of the manufacturer's drivers. None of these environments produced a successful loopback. I didn't post photos but maybe you followed the link to the device I bought on ebay. The device has six leads and came with three cables - one for ground, and one each for tx/rx. It has a toggle to choose 3.3v or 5v and I've tried both during loopback tests, but am sticking with 3.3v. Also has a "power on" LED, which is lit constantly when cabled to a USB port, and two small leds for rx and tx, which light up when I transmit/receive (but again when I receive it's just 0x00). I'm going to assume the device is DOA and either exchange or purchase something different. btw, thanks for the (evidently) years of service you've put in to this blog. Once I get a functioning RS232/TTL device I hope to follow the rest of the instructions and get a working drive again. I may be back with other questions in the future.... Best Regards

Thanks for the very quick reply. Unfortunately, it's not the COM port. I used the default port # that was assigned when the drivers installed, and that didn't work. Then I changed the port # in device mgr and in the terminal app (to match that given in devmgr) and that didn't help either. Its strange that when I have the loopback wired up I can send a character out the tx line, and I can see something (null / 0x00) return. When I don't wire up the loopback and I send a character, I see the character go out the tx line, but nothing comes back on the rx line. I guess that's how it's supposed to work, but if the rx side of the device was experiencing a fault I would expect to receive nothing in return - regardless of whether I'd wired up a loopback between tx/rx. I'm not prone to blame a brand new part, but I can't think of any other reasons this loopback test would fail. Regards

Well, I seem a few years late to the party here, but just the other day my Seagate 1TB drive experienced what I believe to be the BSY error. One minute I was in Windows 7, viewing files through Explorer, and as I tried to open a file the entire volume disappeared. After a bit of investigation I realized the drive no longer appeared in BIOS, which led me to research the issue online, and brought me here. My model is ST31000340AS with firmware SD15. I've spent many hours reading documents, hundreds of posts on this blog, the README file, and watching youtube videos, etc. I believe I understand the process to attempt to fix the drive but am hung up on something mundane. The drive has data that unfortunately I've not backed up recently; recovery of the data is very important to me. I recently purchased a UBS/Serial/TTL hardware device from ebay. My issue is that I can't seem to get the device to work, even in a loopback test. But I suspect I'm missing something obvious since the device is new and the seller has a good online rep, and seems to have sold dozens of such devices. The symptom of my issue is that when I send a character (hex or text) on the tx line, I get a response on the rx line, but the response is always null (0x00). I've tried this on WinXP, Win 7, multiple USB ports, multiple versions of the driver (the device is based on an FTDI chip), and using multiple terminal apps (including SerialTrace which shows a wonderful verbose debug output of every event). I've modified baud rates, COM port numbers, etc. Either the device showed up DOA or I'm missing something. btw, I have tried the device with the Seagate drive and I get no response; I've tried it with the drive controller board attached to the physical drive and with the board completely removed from the physical drive. Can anyone help with the loopback test I'm experiencing? Cheers