This drive was purchased as part of a Lenovo Y550P laptop in February. It was manufactured in Nov 09.
Yesterday I was running Windows 7 when I got an unexpected blue screen, and when I restarted the laptop BIOS would not even recognize that a drive was present.

I took it to an Intel X58 based machine, and it was able to recognize the model number of the drive in BIOS and report that S.M.A.R.T. was bad.
I booted into a live CD with MHDD and was able to retrieve the following information.

Hard Drive Model: ST9500325AS
Firmware: 0010 (on the drive there are some additional characters printed after 0010, I'll look at those soon)
LBA: 0 (!)
Cache Size: 8192KB
Logical and Physical Sector Size: 512B
ATA Version: 8
Supports: LBA48, HPA, DLMC, LBA, MSIG, DMA, UDMAS, MWDMAC (I wrote these down but I can't read some of what I wrote)

"Getting SMART attributes, error, device error"
"Recal Fail"
"This device does not support LBA mode"

How can I establish a Terminal connection with this drive? I see other posts mention this.

You need to buy equipment to do that.

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http://www.pclab.com.pt facebook.com/PCLAB.A.T
ACELab partner

Which equipment?

What do I need to do? Flash the firmware?

SATA:The serial terminal pins are as per the 4th posting (with pdf) on
serial-terminal-pins-ide-5400-t16559.html

But having terminal access may or may not help
and you risk making it worse
But can at least get the ctrl-L firmware info etc


NB I still can't find the serial terminal pins on a 2.5" IDE Seagate in anyone wants to answer that question

Ok, I'm going to make or buy this cable and attempt terminal access.

Is there a list of commands available? What will I be attempting? A firmware re-write?

This might help
http://acelaboratory.com/pc3000.udma.php

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Please don't hijack my thread. xsoliman you should start a new thread for that topic.

I would really like to know. Is there a list of commands for terminal access available? What will I be attempting? A firmware re-write?

If you spend hours digging on the internet yes, but it won't be black and white and won't have instructions.

Great. I'm willing to search for hours for this list. It seems that you don't have it but I hope that someone here does.

I'm in a situation where I'm willing to learn as much as I can to fix the drive but I'd rather not send it off. I've called some places and they give me an estimate of $500-$800.

I'd like to learn how to do this even with the $10,000+ tools that are available.

Ok.
Not for this model. I have seen one for 7200.11 drives floating around, but it is not going to be helpful at all, in my opinion.
No. If anything you might be thinking about attempting to apply a fix that was designed for a different problem and different model of drive to this one.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Ok, thanks for your opinion. After reading some more posts here, I see that people use the commands on other drives and even other brands,

Remember that this data is just NOT important enough that I am willing to learn anything.

So, someone. Which commands should I try?

If you really want to fix your drive for free while learning, you have to do your own work. I would go on other forums where newbies help newbies, of course if they can.Big hint : the problem may be elsewhere, and your attempts tinkering with commands can make the drive FUBAR.

heh?

If the data was extremely important I would send it to a professional. In this case I'd like to learn as much as I can with the reward being my semi-important data.

Times for free lunch are over, sorry.

I haven't used it myself, but you may be able to use SeDiv to safely interrogate your drive.

SeDiv - HDD Seagate Terminal for Windows:
http://sediv2008.narod.ru/Easy1014.rar (software)
http://sediv2008.narod.ru/HelpEn.rar (documentation)

Discussion:
sediv-hdd-seagate-terminal-for-windows-t11980.html

The above demo version is time limited. You will probably see a message in Russian which translates to "This version is outdated". If so, then set your system date back to around April 28, 2009 (date stamp of SeDiv.exe).

Useful like a tit on a bull if you don't know what to do. P.s. demo doesn't write.

Are you referring to the 7200.11 fix?
If I had PC-3000 would you help me?

If you had legit pc3k or other tool you would have had TS too so any other help wouldn't have been necessary.

So you're saying that if I purchase a PC-3000 I'm very likely to recovery my data?