I have a strong desire to Engineer a tool, for all of us, to incorporate firmware access/recovery for these hard drives as I see it pointless to "rent-a-hdd" when it suddenly crashes on you and you're faced with recovery fees just to have another one crash on you... so on..
thus far I..
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UART's Seagate MagicHack.JPG [ 5.23 MiB | Viewed 59873 times ]
designed my own RS-232 to TTL solution shown here (nvm magicHack) .
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Seagate MagicHack in action!.JPG [ 4.88 MiB | Viewed 59873 times ]
The chip you see is the serial Firmware chip, awaiting r.E. (RevEng[e]) from me. This is pretty straight forward, functional and is getting me closer to retrieving over 2+T of software on my backup drive!
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Seagate Hack Setup - NoBootChip.JPG [ 5.1 MiB | Viewed 59873 times ]
This is the actual controller board. Luckily, SeaGal engineered it to "stand-alone" without any dampers or pullup/downs in circuit so this was possible without destruct.
Eventually while intercepting the SATA protocol I'll closely study the firmware, memory stack and commands from the MCU (tips welcomed guys) . Have a look:
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Seagate Hack - Yeti Debugger screen.JPG [ 5.77 MiB | Viewed 59873 times ]
Their debugger equipped bootstrap code is called "Yeti Boot", dating back to 2007! seemingly beautiful flexible code for the Barracuda ST31000528AS stuff and others but like I told the Seagalte crew "I just want my data back, you didn't have to start a war.."
The HDD TTL access - You should have a dongle with a connector that will fit a 2mm pitch, 4 node connector (Ex: IDE notebook drive). Connectors are labeled: [ TX|RX|GND|N/C ], hard drive writing faced up or just remember "TRiG" and go with the Max232 family & follow the datasheets.. enjoy; interceptors circuits are next. ~UART
"I don't believe in luck; I believe in Precision."