ctblack

When I tried using 5 volt from the power supply to power the rs-232 convertor, I also gotten nothing. I then used 2 'D' cell batteries to power the convertor and connecting all the negatives together to make it work.

The solution is not OS dependent, any terminal software should work. The tricky part is if all you have access to is USB ports and no DB9(or DB25) serial ports, then you'll need to find or make the right cable.

I did remember reading from earlier post, there were someone swaped the PCB from a "bad" drive into a working drive and did the firmware update on the "bad" PCB, and then swap it back to make the "bad' drive work again, but then they were complaining about some unusual noise the drive now makes.

This is exactly what happened to me when I tried, then I used a level 3 spin down command instead: F3 T>/3 F3 3>Z with F3 T>/3 F3 3>Z again LED 000000CE FAdr00280569 LED 000000CE FAdr00280569 something else to try? Did you try the level 3 command with the PCB alone or still mounted on the drive? All I can tell you is, I tried that with the PCB mouted on the drive and it worked for me. There might be other level spin down commands, you can look in the earlier posts of this thread for a complete list of all the commands.

This is exactly what happened to me when I tried, then I used a level 3 spin down command instead: F3 T>/3 F3 3>Z

I got my torx screw driver set from The Source (formerly Radio Shack store), $20 a set.

I took the curcuit board out and flipped around to solder some "wire wrap" wires to the back of the pins. You can try to use those plastic connectors like a video card fan power connector and break them open so only the metal pin is show, I tried that but found it to be too closed together and can short each other easily when it is pushed into the HD's pin, especially if you tries to connect all three (TX/RX/GND).

I have successfully unbricked my drive using Gradius2's instructions! Thank you very much Gradius!! A few things I found that might already been encountered by others, as I didnt read all of the postings (39 pages and still growing!!). I just wanted to share them as they might be helpfull: 1. I started the procedure using the PC's power supply (+5V) to power the convertor and found it does not work! I needed to use 2 'D' cells batteries in series to provide the 3V power to the convertor inorder for the convertor to be able to convert the hard drive's data to RS-232 back to the PC. 2. I keep getting the "LED:000000CE FAddr:00280569" error after I issue the level 2 'Z' spin down command. After checking my connections many times and retried many times. I then used a level 3 'Z' spin down command and it woked! 3. I did'nt have any of the those hard drive pin connectors to the TX/RX/GND pins, so I used some very fine wire to solder to them, got the terminal session working, but all my lower case characters sending to the hard drive would end up corrupted returning as extened ascii characters. I then used the 'B9600' command to change my connection speed to 9600 baud (since the command is in upper case), and everything else worked from that point on.