Putting the wrong PCB on won't scramble the drive.

All this effort seems a bit much for a £95 fix

Could well be a £1000+ fix before much longer

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I don't understand why your replacement board allowed your drive to be visible in BIOS, but then I'm not a DR guy. Perhaps BIOS was seeing the drive's ID in ROM???

Your CA-42 cable is a strange one. ISTR a similar problem at the Seagate forums. It appears that not all CA-42 cables are made the same. I would have thought that the cable would have identified itself as a USB-serial RS232 bridge chip rather than as a modem. Did the cable have the standard Pop-Port connector? How does it show up in Device Manager? Is there an additional COM port? Which terminal program are you using to talk to the CA-42 cable?

I suspect that the "unused" pin is pulled up to the 3.3V supply. On some models it is used to select a 1.5Gbps communication speed. I'd leave the appropriate wire connected to this pin and then loop other pairs of wires together until you find the Tx/Rx pair, assuming they are on different wires.

Can you see your cable with Microsoft's UVCView utility?
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/USB_ID ... ew.x86.exe

Thanks for the information - it's much appreciated - I'm still thinking this can be done and I'm enjoying learning about this Even a £95 fix is too much and I also think I might have some old company files on there which I would get shot for if they were let out of my sight - not that anyone would want 6 year old specs for crap software but technically I'd be in the wrong in their eyes.

When I had the other board from another same size and model Barracuda on the drive, it was seen in BIOS and in Disk Management it showed up as being the "new" drive (well, I say that but it showed up as having the newer SD1A firmware as opposed to the SD15 on the original one). It also showed as a 0 size drive and said "Not ready" and the Initialise menu option just returned the generic "I/O device error."

When I followed some other guides earlier on in the journey I used the Nokia drivers for the cable, and when the red wire is connected to TX or the unused pin, in Windows device manager it shows as an entry under Modems - possibly as a result of the Nokia drivers. It had the wide multi-pin connector at the end but not all the pins I saw on the pinout diagram of the pop port. It only had 6 pins corresponding to the 6 wires.

I connect to the drive using hyperterminal on Windows 7.

When the cable only is plugged into the USB I can't see it using the UVCView. I also tried to see what was connected to COM1 (cable shows as COM2 or 4 when connected) using SiSoft Sandra but it didn't show anything connected to it.

I'll give it a go with red to the unused pin, black to GND and then pair up the others - when I do this am I safe enough swapping whilst connected to the Hyperterminal session and trying the CRTL-Z until I get a response or do I have to disconnect and reconnect at each swap?

Which pins were present in the Pop-Port?

When connecting to the drive with HyperTerminal, use the "Direct to ComX" option.

I'm suggesting that you only connect the one wire to the drive's pullup resistor (the "unused" pin). This wire could be a handshaking pin. I'm assuming the remaining wires contain the Tx/Rx pair. Test these other pairs using loopback, not by connecting them to the drive.

I'm puzzled as to what is actually inside the cable. Can you locate an INF file in the Nokia driver set? This may help ID the internals.

Ok, you've hit the nail on the head.

Red to unused pin
Black to GND
White to TX
Blue to RX

and we have the F3 on CTRL-Z

Now I will go for a smoke and calm myself down before reading up on the next steps.

PS Not having a lot of luck with the inf files. Will do this later after I attempt the next part.

Back to that video...

Well I got to the spin down, remove card and do the power cycle on the drive, unfortunately on reconnecting the SATA power cable my system rebooted and so the HT session was gone.

I've used a laptop now with the CA42 drivers installed and have connected to the drive using HT again on COM23, but there is no response from the drive to CTRL-Z.

I double checked the TX RX wires again with a loopback and definitely have the right ones, oh and I put the card back in as well to see if that made a difference. It did in that HT wouldn't connect without the card covering the contacts again.

Soooo close. Yet so far. Any thoughts?

If we can get through this one I'm going to donate 20GBP to a charity and will post up the receipt so people know I've done it.

Short circuit across the sata power connector?
Caused by plugging in or unplugging the power plug with a slight twisting action?
Just a thought.

As was mentioned before...........

with Seagate it shouldn't make a difference. Only Hitachi's are really susceptible to this rule.

This is a learning job more than anything. I don't have anything which I don't have either on the web or on another drive.

I got back in by replacing the card and realising that I had the RX and TX back to front (way to go dyslexic boy ) and then from the laptop started again. When I got to the power off this time, the laptop stops seeing the modem and you get the disconnecting device sound in Windows. Now without the card in I can't connect to COM23 again.

So after tea the card goes back in and then the next question is - is it ok to proceed without the power off or is there a command version to keep the connection active? I think it's peculiar to my cable.

Well, it's all done and sorted.

Because my cable needed the red wire to the unused jumper pin I couldn't do the power off and on before you enter the command to rewrite the table, so I did it without.

This resulted in the LEDxxxx FADDRxxxx error and I went to bed, befuddled once more.

This morning however, a connection through the jumpers was possible with the card removed, and I was in at a prompt again, entered the command and Bob's your Uncle, it was done.

I then went ahead and copied all data off it on that first successful reboot, and then applied the SD1A from the bootable iso image, which all went ahead successfully.

So thanks again to all who helped out, especially fzabkar.

I've donated my £20 to the Royal British Legion, receipt is here:

Good job man. Congrats.

Congratulations.

Sorry I wasn't able to respond to your other questions. I've had some problems with my PC.