MrZilla

That's strange. I'll see if I can look into this later today. // Zilla

The serial number of the PCB is written to the system sector of the disk during manufacturing. It should be possible to change the PCB s/n, so that they match once more, however: There is no guarantee that changing the S/N will actually fix the problem you're seeing You could possibly destroy your PCB If you want to make the attempt, this is the procedure I would use: Please note: I have not actually tested this myself. Everything I write here is gathered from the Seagate Diagnostic Commands manual. There is a very real risk that you could be worse off when you're done than when you started. Connect your cable to the old PCB (that was originally placed on the disk), and give the following commands: F3 T>/1 F3 1> # Where # is: Display PCB information Display the PCB information burnt by $ command. This will give you PCB EC#, PCB S/N and PCB P/N. Then you can connect to your new PCB and give the following commands: F3 T>/1 F3 1> $ Where $ is: Set PCB information and update flash The user will be prompted to enter PCB EC#, PCB S/N and PCB P/N. This feature is used by PCB plant to burn in PCB#, EC# and serial #. Then the drive plant will automatically retreive the information. Supply the information from the old PCB, then power off the drive for a few seconds then try the standard recovery procedure again.

You could always make your own using a RS232<->TTL converter, as described in the first post. It's really not hard to do.

[serious] You would have TWO not working drives, and it is even possible that when you return the board borrowed to the drive where it was, you will still have TWO not working drives. DO NOT do it! [/serious] Indeed. The faulty data that causes the BSY error is stored inside the disk (read the explanation in the original post for more info), and simply replacing the PCB with the controller will not fix it. This solution requires you to invest a few $ in equipment, but it's not that hard to pull off, and in my personal opinion it's well worth the satisfaction of fixing something yourself, not to mention getting all your data back.

I decided to make one last attempt to re-flash the drive with SD1A, and amazingly enough, it worked! So now my drive is back in working state, and I'm happy. // Zilla

That's a good idea, I'll do that // Zilla

Indeed, I do not plan to get any new Seagate disks in the future. I had still hoped to be able to use this disk to store unimportant data. Warranty isn't really my style, I'd rather try to fix it until I break it for real Well, I didn't expect the firmware update to break anything (although I know it is always a possibility), and I didn't really have any place to dump 1TB of data. Still, everything on the disk is replacable, so I'm not too worried, but I refuse to give up without a fight B) I'll go through the command reference tonight and see if I can find any commands that can give some more information on the state of the disk. Maybe I'll try to re-run the firmware update to see if it changes anything, but I'm not hopeful on that. // Zilla

Hi all, First, let me say thank you to Gradius2 for this very easy to follow guide, it is worth a lot I followed the steps, and successfully managed to restore my ST31000340AS to working state (I had the BSY error). After checking that all my data was intact on the disk, I opted to upgrade the firmware on it to SD1A to make sure I didn't end up with the same problem once more. However, this is were my disk stopped working again The firmware upgrade was successful (I got the message "Power cycle your drive NOW to complete upgrade"), and after the power cycle the drive is detected by the BIOS, with correct model number and firmware revision. But, for some reason, the disk now claims to be 33MB in size... My question now is, has anyone seen anything similar before? Should I follow the "0 LBA" reocvery procedure and do a SMART format? Please let me know if you have any thoughts on the issue. // Zilla