blinker425

post-script: two days later and all is well. the BSY drive is fine and patched. the other two affected drives were patched (backed up first), and seem to be fine also.

Just to be clear, I had 2 NTFS partitions on this particular drive. Both are fine AFAIK.

I followed the basic process to fix BSY, and retained all my data. Regenerating the partitions is non-destructive, at least it's not supposed to be /blinker425/

Gradius & Fatlip, you guys rock. (thanks to others as well) A few days ago a 7200.11 500Gb drive went silent, and of course I went non-linear since I didn't back up this particular drive. It had a bunch of VMs on it that I could recreate over a week or two, but still a PITA. Seagate offered to RMA under warranty, but made no promises to recover data. Sad. Then I googled this forum and found the posts from Gradius and fatlip. 1. I live near a Frys, and got the Schmartboard RS232-TTL package for $15 plus some headers and jumpers last night. 2. dug up an old 9-pin serial cable (moral: never throw old stuff away) 3. followed the setup per Gradius and fatlip with a little less work: no solder required. 4. got power to the board using the smaller floppy power connector from my tower's PS. that socket alignment perfectly matches the spacing of a header pin pair, so i inserted the long side of the header pins into the power connector for red (+5) and black (gnd). The header short side pins sticking up from the power plug were just long enough to seat the 3" jumpers that in turn connect to the power pins on the schmartboard. 5. powered up and got the drive prompt on hyperterminal. 6. followed all of Gradius' steps, including the G-link option. Why? because I was reading from two different posts from Gradius, one of which mentions G-Link as optional, and the other does not. I was following the non-optional version. 7. reconnected the drive to my system and was rewarded with drive access happiness! Now that the drive is working again, I'm backing it up so I can apply the fixed firmware update as pointed to by Gradius. I have 2 more drives in this system, and decided I better check them out. Guess what? They both are Seagates. One is a 7200.11 and the other is a ES.2, and Seagate's diagnostic tool shows both of them also have the firmware problem...they just haven't gotten BSY yet. I'm going to back them up and flash the new firmware asap. Thanks again to Gradius and Fatlip./ /blinker425/