Toshiba Firmware appears to be corrupt, suggestions?

[rogfanther]

If you are going to receive another Toshiba drive, first thing is to test the cable / hyperterminal with it, so that you know that part of your equipment is working correctly.

[maximus]

As alternative send the drive to someone with more experienece for data recovery.....

+1, this is outside of the possible scope of what the OP can accomplish DIY. If the data is that important, get professional recovery. Data recovery firms have privacy policies. If your work is just controversial, you should not need to worry about the recovery. As @spildit stated earlier, if it doesn't contain something as volatile as child porn, you should have no issues. If you have gravely illegal things on it and are worried about being discovered, then maybe we shouldn't be helping you anyway.

[gringobonk]

If you are going to receive another Toshiba drive, first thing is to test the cable / hyperterminal with it, so that you know that part of your equipment is working correctly.

I'll be doing this. I spent the past few hours refreshing my lead addled brain with the subject matter and various possibilities before me. I know the other drive works. I ran MHDD Diags on it and there's no issues. It's detected. I've been taking pictures to log my progress and for reference.

[gringobonk]

Press "enter" on terminal on the known good drive. You should see a ">" prompt.

As alternative send the drive to someone with more experienece for data recovery.....

I'll be checking that soon. Perhaps tomorrow. I have to step back and take stock of everything I have going on.

I need to exhaust my options with the drive under my control first. It's like I said the first time, the moment that thing goes out in the mail I've opened up the possibility that all my legal work that's been typed or DL'd is gone forever. That drive could never make it to you for all I know. It could be intercepted by networked and corrupt judiciary members and lackeys. I'm just trying to reduce to possibility of the data absolutely becoming unrecoverable by exhausting my options on this end. If I get to that point and by good fortune manage to get the drive out to someone such as yourself, then all of my options hinge on the competency and skillset of the DR specialist. There's a world between us. I'm in Hawaii. I think you can get my position. It seems like the most rational from my perspective. Countless hours, days, weeks, and months, have gone into my digital library on law, energy, electricity, and other hobbies.

[gringobonk]

As alternative send the drive to someone with more experienece for data recovery.....

+1, this is outside of the possible scope of what the OP can accomplish DIY. If the data is that important, get professional recovery. Data recovery firms have privacy policies. If your work is just controversial, you should not need to worry about the recovery. As @spildit stated earlier, if it doesn't contain something as volatile as child porn, you should have no issues. If you have gravely illegal things on it and are worried about being discovered, then maybe we shouldn't be helping you anyway.

Just about any thing is possible if one puts their mind to it. I'm the living example. I was writing drivers for generic mice in ASM in 11th grade, msDOS TSRs that snagged the school network admin password , and those skills helped land me a job doing functional brain imaging after college. I like challenges. I just need to keep reading a bit on this topic.The solution might be right around the corner for me and looks like it could be, or I may determine the only method is to try to have the PC3000 type interface used as a pass through for recovery. I'm less worried about privacy than I am about having to track down legal filings, scan them into adobe, convert them to text, re-enter and reformat legal briefs. I just finished a 24 page one that took 3-4 days of work and my carpel tunnel is acting up. But that's still less than having to re-type from scratch. Plus there's video evidence on there of a unlawful traffic stop. I'm not into any porn and kiddy porn people should get torched alive just like pedophiles, but not on the weak standards DAs have for pretty much all crimes so they rack up wins (don't torch the innocent). Porn is messing up the population at large by creating easy access to something that floods the dopamine circuits in the brain. It's bad news, especially for people with low self control. It even lowers their instincts to be closer to that of an animal which is readily manipulable by stimulus-response Pavlovian conditioning. Any way, not trying to look down my nose at others, just look out for people who don't necessarily see the long term harm with something that may seem benign. How bout them cigarettes? Cancer....who would have known, right?

Persuasion is an interesting thing. But like I've said earlier I need to reduce the likelihood of potential permanent loss by exhausting my options before trusting that said drive could make it from point A to B without any problems. Neither I nor you all have any control over the supremely competent people hired for postal transport. I'm sure they'd never throw any thing labeled fragile.



Time to call it a night. I'll be back at this soon enough. Thanks for all the responses. I am starting to think it's possible the ROM is damaged but gotta do more reading and testing...

[rogfanther]

If the bottle was sent with that little packaging and protection, then you need to complain to the sender, not the postman.

[HddDonorMarket]

In MRT ,Old model toshiba doesn't come ready easily.

And not recognise hdd info. New models mostly get ready sometimes waiting after long time , some times press enter on com port connection.

Another way that I have used to use , after waiting long time just open " change drive info . section". If info seen in this screen drive gets ready.
This is working most new models also some old models.

Another way changing timeout settings to bigger value. MRT default settings sometimes not enough .

I guess I can say " I can turn of busy light all kind of toshiba drives with that methods or some more tricks that I don't remember now"