Ginjaian

Still a problem in 2018! A family member had a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB ST3500320AS drive in an external USB caddy, on firmware SD81, which had a bunch of old family photos on it, with no backup. One morning recently, it disappeared after being turned off and back on again. He asked me if I could do anything with it. I connected it directly via SATA to my PC, and it failed to POST on the BIOS screen, despite sounding like it was spinning up okay, which I thought odd. After some searching, I found this thread (and a few others, and youtube videos), which helped diagnose this as the BSY problem. I used a Silicon Labs CP2102 USB to TTL serial module to unbrick it, rather than the Nokia lead (couldn't find one!). I had problems with serial software; I was using Windows 7, so Hyperterminal isn't installed. I tried using Putty, but it wouldn't connect, leaving me scratching my head for a couple of hours, wondering if something else was wrong with the drive, or if I'd hooked up the USB to TTL wrong. I ended up downloading a trial version of Hyperterminal from hilgraeve.com, and that connected straight away! Following the instructions from the first post, I unbricked the drive, and it sprang back to life, mounted fine and I copied off all the data to multiple other drives. The family member doesn’t trust the drive any more, naturally! So he left the drive with me. Knowing that if I used the drive it would eventually brick again, I decided to update the firmware to SD1A from http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/207951en?language=en-gb . The .exe version of the updater wouldn’t work on this drive. I read elsewhere that the BIOS SATA mode had to be set to Legacy or IDE, rather than AHCI, but that didn't help with the .exe version. I couldn't find any software that would convert the .iso version of the firmware updater to a bootable USB stick, so I had to dig out a USB CD drive, burn the .iso version of the firmware to a blank CD (found in my loft! Haven’t needed them for at least 5 years…) and booted from that, which did finally work and update the drive to SD1A. Contents of the drive survived the update with no problems. Not sure I really trust this drive either... but thanks for the help and voyage of discovery!