Hello.

I have a Seagate F3 drive that I am conducting some experiments on in regards to directly accessing the firmware. I have successfully accessed the drive through a COM port and I have access to some of the Seagate Diagnostic commands. What I am interested in is a possible way to copy or 'dump out' the Service Area for head 0,1,2..etc. I know I have the ability to read individual firmware modules but ideally I'd like to be able to request and copy every Service Area block address per head using the Seagate commands, creating a raw dump of the data, which I can then further investigate independently.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Hello Zero182,

you can use SeDiV or any other software solution. But this software is not free.
You can check Xsoliman post and his research

Hello jerovsek,

Thanks for the reply!

I appreciate the software will do this for me however, I am looking for a challenge and to achieve this using the Seagate F3 diagnostic commands. I have read the post provided by Xsoliman which has given me a lot of handy information. Unfortunately I still require aid in what commands or command combination to fully read the Service Area and simply dump it out into a file.

I am not looking to create my own tool but am determined to achieve this Service Area read/dump using the Seagate diagnostic commands.

Thanks in advance!

What you're asking for took years of research by teams of engineers. They're not going to just give you the raw commands. Besides each drive family is different. If you want to deal in this type of stuff, you'll need to invest in professional tools like PC-3000.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

If you already have a tool, and if the tool does not provide a terminal window, then you could snoop on the COM port via a second COM port, assuming you couldn't snoop it with a software based port sniffing tool.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thanks for both of your comments. I highly appreciate and respect the feedback and info you have provided!

You should get into reverse engineering for existing tools. That seems to be more popular these days.

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

Reverse Engineering HDD Software using IDE Port Monitor:
http://malthus.zapto.org/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=611

http://nazyura.hardw.net/000005.htm

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thanks for the comments everyone. I seem to be making good progress within the terminal!

Just a quick question, is there any way to increase the number of blocks the read buffer will read at a time? it currently only reads blocks of 200 when doing a read comparison, was wondering if its possible to increase this using a command?

Thanks in advance!