Hi everybody, thanks for all your guys here, especially the ones of the earliest hours for their great efforts here... After argueing and complaining for weeks with seagate support, wich definitely is a NO-support, I found this forum. After trying to connect my TTL-CMOS converter I had from our homebrew project for Comunication with our Ham (Amateur Radio) Devices, I got some replies from my defective HDD. First, I was very confused about the tutorial and explanations on page 1 of this monster-thread. Unsure about the steps, I guess I did something wrong. So now I hope some of you might figure out how I can gain access to my drive again. My HDD: ST 3500320AS My steps: 1) connecting HDD to TTL-CMOS and using the power- and data-connector of my external HDD-enclosure to provide the HDD with power. 2) using Hyperterminal with enabled screens-Echos, got the connections and answers like : F3 T> etc... 3) using the m0,2,2 sommand: so far so good. Now I guess my mistake was not to understand that basicaly there are two kind of errors... LBA0 or something like that and the busy-thing-error... So I thought the tutorial on the first page is not finished at that point and tried to do the second part for the busy-error: 4) I connected my CMOS-TTL to the HDD and did the following: 5) So now after applying all those steps above I downloaded the correct new firmware for my HDD from following page: http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/self...951&Hilite= and created a boot disk. When connecting my HDD to the external USB enclosure and booting my laptop with this external HDD enclosure connected via USB, the firmware utility hangs when trying to read and recognizing the HDD connected externaly. Now at this point it hangs until I power of my device, then the message could not read from HDD appears and the Firmwareutility will abort. So additional I have to mention, I also tried to aplly the PaperCard Trick, while I was not understanding, that maybe only the LBA-0 Tutorial would have been enough in my case. So when trying to apply the card and to disconnect the motor-contacts from PCB, my hyperterminal said: So after trying several times and not beeing confused about the tutorial and my error messages, I went back and did the m0,2,2 thing again. After that I was at step 5) (see above) Ok, If you have read so far, pls no comments like: you should have read carefully etc... I am aware, that I maybe had make some mistakes due to that I did read carefully but actually did misunderstood some parts. A ) So now my big question after applying BOTH tutorials for the 2 issues, did I wrecked my HDD or may I be still able to rescue the drive? B ) Is that a problem to trying to boot the Seagate-Firmware-CD with the defective and "repaired" HDD connected in an external enclosure and connected via USB as an external drive? The After-Bios-Messages of my Notebook recognizes the HDD when booting up from the Firmware-CD. I have no other PC with SATA to connect the drive and to try the Firmware CD on. Thanks in advance for your replies Yasmina