jhr

TLDR: I took the board off and cleaned some minor surface corrosion from a few spots on the hidden side of the board. Most notable was near the pads that power the motor and across some of the surface mount pins. My HDD "died" during operation BIOS didn't detect, and contrary to what I thought, it wasn't spinning on power up. I read enough to know the instructions in this thread dont target this failure, but I was in denial. I was following Carter's PDF guide and got as far the feedback loop on my "FTDI friend" from Adafruit (USB to TTL) when I finally noticed my HDD wasn't spinning up. I went ahead and took the board off and that's when I noticed some discolored spots that I'm calling corrosion. It was minor and wiped away with my shirt. After that the BIOS began recognizing it again. My guess, the spot near the motor pads was causing too much resistance or the spot near the pins was causing a bridge/short. I created an account to see some pictures, so I figured I'd leave my story and say Thanks!. Thanks to this thread, I learned that I need to update the firmware AND I learned that HDDs have a serial console. Just to keep it going: READ ME FIRST: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/143880-seagate-barracuda-720011-read-me-first/ PDF Guide: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/133387-debricking-the-seagate-drives/