[Randyman...]

My buddy's 1TB Seagate 7200.11 drive recently bit the dust - or so we both thought. This drive contained an OS and a Data partition - and you guessed it the Data partition wasn't backed up His PC froze one day - and then wouldn't boot. I determined the HD was bad and did some further testing. The drive would lock up the BIOS when POSTing, and would use a solid 25% CPU for days on end w/o being recognized when added as a hot-swap drive (ICH10R/RST9.6).

I was about to attempt a PCB swap (even posted a WTB Classified Listing for a donor drive). Well, nd4spdbh2 posted this little nugget of info and piqued my interest:

http://sites.google.com/site/seagatefix/


So I bought the Serial-to-TTL level shifter and gave it a shot. After a few failed attempts it worked. The cheap PC I was using would freeze when hot-powering the drive due to an inadequate PSU (couldn't handle the inrush current demands)! So I used an external power source for the drive - and had the TTL grounded to the drive so I didn't have any issues with Tx/Rx grounding. After that adjustment, the procedure worked exactly as the link indicates.

I hope this can help someone else with a 7200.11 that exhibits these issues. The drive must be unrecognizable (locks up the BIOS, etc) for this "fix" to work. Other failures can't be resolved with this method - but this type of failure is fairly common AFAIK...

Thanks goes to nd4spdbh2 for posting the link