Just a note, this project was a bit outside my area of expertise, and I have since moved on from the project/company. I did get shipped out another HDD which was super helpful for testing purposes (crossing whatever wires I wanted on one of them and whatever other wild experiments lol) and the two are just kicking around my house right now in case I ever want to jump back into this.
To the other responses, I was not able to bypass the message without shorting out the entire chip (thus ruining the project like Spildit mentioned in a prior post).
DON'T just willy-nilly touch wires together! On this project alone, I bricked
1 HDD
2 HDD power cables
1 FT232 Chip
1 Arduino Board
1 USB (laptop) socket
It's good in practice for learning, but not with "real" environments. Another good tip is to grab an arduino board so you have a bit more control than just FT232 rx/tx testing (you can program signals and such, though I didn't have too much luck going this route) as well as a multimeter for testing specific connections (just set it to the "noise" dial and hit connections with R/Blk wires from the meter to test connectivity) and resistances.
So here's the advice I got from the company :
1. The HDD device is
supposed to become unrecognized by a normal computer system after some time (it's programmed this way).
2. Imagine the micro-board as a mini computer. What components are analogis to say RAM? Processor? Physical memory? And then, to that end, which component(s) is the the one messing up?
My answer to the question (and confirmed over the phone) was the boot-up memory for the functioning of the device, i.e. the winbond SPI flash chip which you can find documentation for here :
https://www.winbond.com/resource-files/ ... 242015.pdf.
What was wrong with it (and how to fix it), though, I can't answer. From my experience (and my memory is a bit dated as of right now) it was that some custom code running on this 4MB chip had a loop that I couldn't send messages through. The solution is a physical one (hinted at), but in practice, this proved to be rather difficult as I only had 1 previous board to work on, and mix-and-matching wires turned out to be a good way to ruin everything listed above (RIP!).
I have some diagrams posted below of the chip ins/outs as well as some of the links connecting them which I'll post below. If anyone does eventually figure this out, I would
LOVE to hear their solution, but physical hardware is just beyond me as of right now :/