cereal77

Someone earlier in this thread asked if anyone had successfully RUINED their drive by this process. I'm not blaming the process, (just myself) but here's my woeful story and if anyone can help, please do: HD is a 1GB Seagate ST31000340AS w/BSY error (does not show up in BIOS) 1)Successfully built RS232 link to HD with alldav adapter and USB-to-serial cable. Got the "F3 T>" prompt. 2)used the cardstock trick to isolate the connectors, successfully got the drive to spin down, connected the PCB, then spin back up. 3)Successfully did a S.M.A.R.T. erase with "N1" command. 4)here's where the deviations start - after the SMART erase I did NOT detach the power from the drive. Why? Because I was reading some id***'s guide who linked from this forum and didn't mention that step. Is it necessary? I don't know, but I'd like to send the guy an email blaming him for my dead hard drive and the worldwide economic collapse in general. 5)after the SMART erase i got myself back to F3 T> and typed the "m0,2,2,0,0,0,0,22" command. (I understand the revised version of the guide had a "m0,2,2,,,,,22" command - but someone said they are the same command as the "0"'s don't really mean anything... is that true? 6)waited... waited some more. Got really depressed around the 1hr mark. Knew I had heard of someone else who had this problem so I searched the forums. Eventually I shut the power down. 7)I tried again. Got the "F3 T>" prompt. Did the SMART erase, then went to power down... 8)here's the disaster - as I disconnected power, the RX or TX cable - or maybe it was both - got disconnected from the HD's PCB. I couldn't believe it. Knew this was bad. Wanted to chuck entire computer out the window. 9)So I tried again... and here's where I am. Everytime I hook up the HD, I no longer get any response in the terminal (i'm using Putty on WinVista 32bit). Feedback loop on the adapter works fine - so the problem is in the HD definitely. But no response to "CTRL-Z". Ever. 10)I've tried hooking up the HD through the SATA port - previously it was not recognized in the BIOS at all (BSY error) but now it does show up - as a 0GB HD. Doesn't show up as a drive in Windows but shows up as uninitialized in Disk Management. When it tries to initialize it, Windows says there is an I/O error. Is this the 0 LBA error? 11)Maybe you guys will think I'm an id*** for this but I thought hey, it can't hurt to try and update the firmware since the BIOS sees it. So I tried it... and it worked. It updated the drive with "MooseDT-SD1A-3D4D-16-32MB" which is the new SD1A I got off the Seagate site a few weeks ago in late March. However the drive still doesn't show up in Windows or Disk Management. So that didn't fix anything. 12)What are my options now? I considered buying another ST31000340AS and swapping PCB's to see if that works. Thought I read a post from someone who tried that and it worked. My other inclination is to stop pretending to be an expert at something I'm not before I do some real damage to my computer. Ideas? Have I bricked my drive permanently? Should I use it as a doorstop? Thanks all.