Hi,

I have a ST3320820AS drive here (firmware 3.AAC) that I need to recover. I'm learning the seagate serial commands, and I'm getting somewhere....

(I try to learn on spare seagate drives, but when I'm confident I won't wreck things I might do them on the drive that needs to be recovered.)

I found that the bad drive can still be addressed pysically. It won't go into the /9 commandset, but in the /2 command set I can seek to a specific track, read a few blocks and then dump the buffer. I can then "see" the user's data. Good!

writing a program to send the commands, and decode the buffer dumps would work, but it would take around 10 years to read the whole drive..... Not ideal.

I have a few questions: Other drives allow me to set the baud rate to 115200: But not this one. It will go as high as 19200, but nothing higher that I tried switches baud rate (I tried 38400 and 115200). Why won't this drive go higher?

Is there a way that I can tell the drive to do SATA but in "physical mode" such that I can quickly read all the physical blocks? I will then figure out the mapping to logical blocks later. As long as I have the raw physical data, I can continue from there...

Can I maybe initialize the physical mapping in such a way that it translates directly, and that I can read the drive over SATA?

Where do the physical to logical translations live? Can I try to read them from the serial port, and maybe have that help me recover the lost physical to logical mapping? Does anybody know the format that these are stored in?

The other drive that I tested had a big readbuffer. This one says it's got 10 (ehhh that's in hex... 16(dec)) read buffers, does anybody know why this one has so little allocated for read buffers? Maybe I can issue the command "read physical" over the serial port, and then read the buffer over sata? Does anybody know how to read the buffers, without issuing a read-disk request? Hmm. That won't work: Because the logical mapping doesn't work, the drive does not respond to sata commands.

After hitting "^Z" on the serial port, can I make the disk resume its normal program (sata/pata) without having to reset it? It seems as if ^C and ^R both reset it, and reset at least the PATA DMA mode....

First of all post terminal log!

_________________
Adatmentés - Data recovery

The dumped buffer looks like a FAT to me which souds entirely reasonable for where this disk is from.... Looks like I got myself the first 512 bytes of "userdata" from the drive.

Note that I got the prompt back at 9600 baud after the B1152 command.... For this session it was not useful to switch to 19200, which which would've worked.

Detecting the drive from the computer and the issuing a read request results in:
Anybody willing to explain what I'm seeing here? "Er 04" is probably the ata error register, "op 25" probably the command: "read DMA ext"