Thanks HaQue, I hope to learn more as time and reading progresses.

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"Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin revisited

no problem, just a freindly tip, the google search terms:

uart hdd

produces similar answer

On the seagate drives (lets say F3) the drive will spit out all kinds of useful diagnostic info as it boots up / operates. Which can be used to determine where the failure is occurring in the boot/init process.

I am hoping the output is similar for WD, because all i have now is a severely choking sata link negotiation which is not terribly useful.

Have to check it out after the holiday.

But can i use it to see if the SA modules are even readable? If i can pull one of the small modules at least i know the SA is being read. Is there head testing capabilities over the UART console? Im sure there is documentation for this, what should i be looking for, for this model/family

I got an offer from a forum member, and ideally would like to send it his way, but in the end it wont be my money to spend and the data may not be worth it to the customer. So i would like to suss out all possibilities to offer some kind of solution in the case he doesn't want to spend.

Is the firmware on the SPI chip of any value in this case, or are we looking purely at SA modules at this point? i could easily extract the full rom for examination.