I have a bunch of project ideas, all which involve hard drive spindle motors. The problem is, most drives are programmed to spin down if inactive, or if the heads are disconnected. This makes it very difficult to try and use the brushless DC spindle motors. Does anyone have any ideas on how to keep drives spinning indefinitely? Is there a command to do so over the serial port?

Also, does anyone have a full command set for the serial console, or is it some sort of trade secret? All I can find are bits and pieces.

I don't have any specific drive in mind; I'm flexible and can find the right kind if needed. I'd very much like to do this with 15000 RPM drives though.

Thanks!

I found a partial command set, and have been doing some experimenting on a Seagate 7200.7 over the serial console. Yes, I know I could easily brick the drive, but it's junk anyway, and I need to learn somehow.

One problem I keep running into is "Command inactive - no valid cert code detected" when trying to execute certain commands. Can anyone tell me what this means?

If I power up the drive with the heads disconnected, it says "Head Mask 0000 -" for a while, then "Error Reading Reserve Track Defect List". Is there any way to have it ignore these errors, and keep spinning? Maybe change the retries to a very large number? If nothing else, I've figured out if I set up a microcontroller to continuously send "U" over the serial port, I can keep the platters spinning. It works, but it's cumbersome.

http://www.itosaka.com/WordPress/wp-con ... ommand.pdf
http://www.recoveryitalia.com/it/recupe ... mmands.pdf
http://rayer.ic.cz/hardware/hddtech/seadiagc.pdf
http://www.serwisuje.com/blog/seagate.pdf

See the Level 2 commands U and Z.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

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All went well until I plugged the drive in.

http://www.recoveryitalia.com/it/recupe ... mmands.pdf links to a nice pair of shoes

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All went well until I plugged the drive in.

It appears they became defunct since Google last cached their web site:
http://web.archive.org/web/201003070838 ... talia.com/

Maybe data recovery isn't so lucrative in Italy? But then Italian shoes aren't cheap, either.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.