LEX LOOTER

Thanks to you guys, I just managed to unbrick a ST31000340AS. Your help was invaluable. I've been using that drive for three years and never even heard of this issue until it happened to me a couple nights ago. Here are the speedbumps I hit in the process and how I worked around them: 1) Setting up the adapter I used a Prolific PL2303HXA USB-to-Serial bridge chip. I used an orange wire (3.3v) from a sata power cable to power it up. However, it would NOT work with any kind of grounding. I tried grounding it to the HDD GND pin, no dice. Then I tried to ground it to the black wire from the same power cable. It didn't work until I removed the ground wire altogether. Also in order to stablish connection with the hard disk, I had to connect TX to TX and RX to RX. 2) Executing the procedure I was following Carter in Canada's guide, which is very clear and detailed. Everything went really smooth up to the following command: F3 1>N1 Then he says it MIGHT be necessary to power down the HDD (disconnecting the power cable) and then powering it up again before continuing. He also says that's what he did and it worked for him. Well, I did NOT power down/up the HDD. Instead I just followed the instruction to get back to the F3 T> prompt and then I entered the command F3 T>m0,2,2,0,0,0,0,22 and got absolutely NO RESPONSE from the terminal. I waited for two hours and nothing happened. At that point I was really worried because the guide (and several other people) say we should not power down the disk before getting a reply. But since there was nothing else I could do, I disconnected the power cable anyway and started the whole process again. This time, I did power-cycle the HDD after the N1 command. Upon reconnecting the power cable, I used the partition regeneration command as posted by Gradius2: F3 T>m0,2,2,,,,,22 (no zeroes) And everything went just fine. No data was lost and I already updated the firmware. The HDD passed Seatools short generic test and now I'm running the complete test. Thank you very, very much, y'all!