strat95

WOOOHOOOO!!!!! I'm excited because my second try worked and after a reboot my drive is still accessible. But I'm keeping my fingers crossed just in case. I used a TTL-232R-3V3 cable which makes everything quite simple. I had to install drivers for the cable which I found here http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm (see post#681 for instructions on the colour coding for this cable). Connect Orange, Yellow and Black as indicated in that post and ignore the Rx Tx callouts mentioned because as they are listed Orange should be Rx and Yellow is Tx. The cable showed up as COM3. I followed the instructions found in the very first post made by Gradius2 (thanks for this thread and for helping me get all my data back). I did the BSY fix first, because I had already set up the drive with the pieces of paper under the PCB. All went well and I then did the 0 LBA fix just in case. All my data is there (all 900GB of music, movies, pictures, etc...). Thanks so much to Gradius2, Aviko for their brilliance. Thanks to Alexx86 for the suggestion on the TTL-232R-3V3 cable and to AlexLilic for the instruction he gave for using this cable. You guys are data saviours!! Cheers TV

Hi pichi, Thank you for the reply. I tried the procedure and I unbricked my drive. Great success!!! But my happiness only lasted for 1 computer reboot. My drive is bricked again. I was ready to flash it with the latest firmware and I'm back where I started. Oh well, I will try it again. Practice makes perfect. Has anyone here experienced their drive getting bricked again so quickly? I didn't do the 0 LBA fix... but I know that at one point before my drive first got bricked, I could not access the files on it. I did a file/properties on the drive and it showed (if I remember correctly) 0 in size. I rebooted and everything was accessible and the drive worked problem free for quite some time. Well, I'm about to give it another try. TV

Also be sure do not use any adapter to power the hard drive. I also had garbage characters when I used an adapter molex-sata. It's better use directly the sata power connector of the power supply. The recommendation here is to use directly the sata power connector of the power supply. I have an older mother board that only has square molex power connectors. I powered my seagate drive by getting a power adapter (square female molex to sata power). Will I have problems using this adapter cable to power the drive while trying to communicate with the drive? I just finally got my TTL-232R-3V3 CABLE today and was anxious to try it all out until I read this post. Thank you in advance for any answers. TV