Firstly, hello everyone! My first post on this board, really great thread. I, like so many others, have a bricked Seagate 7200.11 series, one day it just stopped being recognized in BIOS. BSY error. Thanks to the solutions on the internet, and this thread, I came this far(I have Win XP): Bought a USB to TTL adapter locally, installed proper drivers, the computer recognizes emulated Port10. The adapter has a small 10-pin female IDC connector on one end, with a small flat ribbon cable going to the adapter itself. Since I can't connect this directly into the HDD, I used an internal USB connector cable, pulling the individual pin connectors out from the full connectors on each side. I didn't even get to use it, because I can't even get a simple loopback test to work. I tried shorting Tx and Rx with a small piece of wire, it doesn't work. I can't see what I'm typing at the Hyperterminal. I just can't get this loopback right, am I missing something really obvious here? Please, any kind of help would be much appreciated. EDIT: I WAS missing something obvious, and feel rather stupid now. I'll leave this here, so if anyone has a similar problem. If you are using a USB to TTL adapter which has IDC ribbon cable to connect to device on one end, like THIS the connections are VERTICAL, not horizontal, meaning the pin1 is at the red stripe, the next pin is ABOVE it, not next to it. Just for those who are unaware of this, like I was, hope it helps at least a little bit. Thanks everyone who offered assistance in this long thread and great, exhaustive instructions, it saved my precious data.