SATA Hard drive failure

[Ivo]

I thought it was going to be easy to find that cable, but I haven't managed yet to find any cheap ones locally (then again, I don't deal with mobile phone stuff like this) - I found one official one from Nokia, priced very similar to the price advertised on the Nokia website (42 Euros, advertised on Nokia for 50 Euros). For that price I could get another Seagate that is the same model and swap the PCBs, which I'm convinced would work.

Maybe I'll have to order a cheap one online.

Ivo.

[Niode]

Jesus, that's a lot. Just get a USB to TTL cable. There's loads on ebay for less than a tenner. No need for the nokia cable if you don't have one lying about (the ones that come with the older Nokia phones work fine). Essentially the cable is just a USB to TTL cable anyway. They're also known as FTDI cables. I got mine for £10 from ebay and I just used some female/male jumper pins I had laying around for prototyping breadboards (you can get them for next to nothing off ebay, they're very common). It works exactly the same way, just make sure you know what the pinout for the TTL/FTDI cable is. All you need is the TX and RX pins (they need to go to opposites on the drive, IE TX(cable) to RX(HDD) and vice versa) don't bother with the ground since it's easier to just power the drive from your PSU rather than hacking some sort of power to the drive from the USB port or a battery. The PSU SATA power connector is grounded anyway.

PS If you are running Vista/Windows 7 I can send you Hyperterminal in a .zip file, ripped straight from an XP install, works perfectly on Vista/win7, I have no idea why they don't include it anymore.

[Ivo]

PS If you are running Vista/Windows 7 I can send you Hyperterminal in a .zip file, ripped straight from an XP install, works perfectly on Vista/win7, I have no idea why they don't include it anymore.

Thanks for the help Niode. I have XP on my netbook. I found the cable yesterday after trying 4 or 5 different small mobile phone shops - it's a "white brand" one and was "just" 10 Euros. It is more or less what I would pay on any online sites when I include the shipping (except the ones that were sending from Singapore or HK).

Now I need to find the crimping pins. I thought it was going to be real easy, but I tried 3 electronic components store an they don't have any! To make things worse, I don't know how exactly how to describe them in Portuguese, so I always have to ask them if they know the serial ports in Computers, and that I want individual female pins like that...

Ivo.

[Niode]

You don't really need crimping pins, you just need something like these:

http://www.coolcomponents.co.uk/catalog ... cts_id=355

[Ivo]

I'm glad to report that I got my data back.

In the end, after I tried the "serial" method myself and failed I sent it to Seagate.
I don't know why the cable method failed - I tested the cable with a multimeter and everything seemed to be ok. I read that in some cases you need to let the contact of the head and obstruct the contact of the PCB to the spindle. In any case I had already lost enough time trying to do it myself and there were some more recent reports that Seagate was being decent about things.

I was a bit afraid as my drive is OEM (although I got it separately, not in a pre-assembled computer from another brand like HP). There are reports that Seagate was only giving free recovery for non-OEM drives, but the worse that could happen is they send me a replacement drive anyway. In the end they estimated that it was the BSY error, arranged for free data recovery (which in this case is probably a 30 min operation for them to do) and sent me back the same drive, "unlocked" with all the data as I left it, and with the updated firmware already flashed into it.

I sent the drive on a Monday and got it back Thursday, it was picked up by a courier and everything. Given this, I may still consider Seagate drives next time I have to decide on drives.

The error shouldn't have passed through their testing, AND they should have somehow managed to advertise it more so more people flashed the new firmware before having problems AND they should advertise more openly that people with the problem can get free recovery for their data.

But in the end when you do send them your disk the response seemed adequate. At least for me - maybe others with OEM drives that came already inside assembled machines didn't get this treatment.

Ivo.

[Niode]

That's bullshit, I can't believe they told me to bollocks when I phoned them up. When asked about where I purchased it from, I told them I bought it as OEM from ebuyer.co.uk and they said that they couldn't recover my drive because it was OEM, they would only offer the service for retail customers.

I wish I had just phoned them back up and tried somebody else.

[Ivo]

That's bullshit, I can't believe they told me to bollocks when I phoned them up. When asked about where I purchased it from, I told them I bought it as OEM from ebuyer.co.uk and they said that they couldn't recover my drive because it was OEM, they would only offer the service for retail customers.

I wish I had just phoned them back up and tried somebody else.

When did you have the problem? My impression from everything I read was that either they:
1. Didn't originally offer the service to any OEM drive OR
2. Excluded some specific OEM drives (like those included in pre-built machines like HP towers or stuff like that).

Apparently your situation excludes 2. Nobody asked me where I got it from, I just gave them the serial number. I think 1. seems likely as I read a bunch from the thread at the Seagate forums and most of the complaints about not getting Seagate's help are concentrated in the early pages.

Maybe Seagate realized the extent of the bug and decided to do some damage control by extending help also to OEM drives. I think that there are a lot of affected customers, this certainly affected and will continue to affect their image.

Ivo.

[Niode]

Well hopefully people will stumble upon this thread when googling if they have the problem and know that they can contact Seagate even if it's an OEM drive.

I wish they hadn't been so arsy about it when I called them.

I had the problem back in September.