@Masterclass, is entitled to his opinion.
I commend "fzabkar" for the information which is MOST helpful.
fzabkar does not know me from "adam", and I could be an 11 year old and a complete tos**r, but he still took the time to provide the information.
This is how communities are built.
now some background.....
The drive actually belongs to my wife... god bless her, It's the second one she has "destroyed" , simply by shutting down the apple computer it is installed in. (interesting in of its self)
Apart from her cat pictures, its not really that important.
I was looking for an interesting "reverse engineering project".. since I just did a Xyratex 5412 array... and this Seagate seems interesting....
Particularly because this is not the first time this Seagate "locked mode" has pissed me off.
Professionally I don't recover disk drives or work in the recovery business.
Currently i'm deciding on my next action....
1. Use the new drive for comparison voltage measurements etc....
2. Just swap the flash chips over and prey to my gods.
3. Desolder the chips and build a reader using pogo pins to get into the microscopically small pads.
4. just swap the PCB over WITHOUT changing the Flash, to see that the motor/heads are not jammed
5. something else interesting (maybe use one of the 20 ~ FPGA development boards I have, to build a "flash emulator" to replace the parameter flash chips on seagate drives)
Something I
have already done for NAND-Flash chips........
Perhaps the only one on the planet that allows a FLASH binary sparse image to be presented to a device as a "real" flash chip in real time. (track NAND commands & memory array changes)
it allows a history of modifications & changes to that image to be tracked and modified in real time. (now how cool is that?, and something I built to analyze USB stick controllers)
Part of a dissertation paper I wrote to "debunk" the bullshit that write blockers can forensically "protect" a forensic image from modification. (yep... so I went over the top)
Now @Masterclass (or anyone else) you can call me out on this, but I'm going to demand a penalty if you do..... some hddguru forum penalty decided by members
https://99percentspace.files.wordpress. ... udster.jpg ...
I have a vicious sense of humor....
The whole point? , basically to make it clear to people
1. don't judge others by your own ability......
2. find out WHAT you are dealing with before shooting your mouth off.
3.
There are some, but qualified diagnostics is required.
is NOT
In fact, my advice is much more useful than posting pseudo-useful pictures and "datasheets".
So what would be MOST useful to the community out of 1-4?