Honestly when I read always the same things the first thought is "here we go again" the second is .............

1) Even having a GENUINE PC3000 UDMA and regular TS , you can't be always up-to-date with everything comes out on the market, unless you have too much time to devote to the cause OR you are very well funded regardless of work income.
2) Recertified drives : if they come out from a Seagate factory, then they know what to do, otherwise, like you said, "Chinesse allready sell certified repaired drives from seagate, they got them all !". The problem is if they work or not - up today didn't see recert drives outside the regular sales channels.
3) I can understand the frustration about not making drives work again like you probably did on pre-F3 (I can say that on later .10 the results were poor anyway) by means of CERT .
If you have limited problems you can fix them, if you want to professionally refurb them you need much more. Same for Toshiba, Hitachi, newer WDs , Fujitsu and other.
4) Sorry for ruining the day, but we have been talking a lot about translator, translator formula and structure of F3, only not all in public. At least I remember endless discussions and remote sessions since the first bugs appeared on early .11 ...
5) They are not exactly made of gold inside , that's why I leave "some" of them to other people.
Beside this , if you are lucky enough and you have drives with VERY LIMITED problems you can fix them even with the very limited resources you have (just have to play with them). BUT DON'T MIX DATA RECOVERY WITH REFURBISHING THEM (PROFESSIONALLY).

In a nutshell , as probably everything was not clear enough : the common "internet fix" can be safe or not depending on each case. It can end on successful access to data or problems or a complete disaster, but each case is by itself. If you want to discuss F3 translator issues , start a new thread and post your - possibly original - considerations. Good luck and keep experimenting - it's never wasted time !

P.S. about people who say "I can fix it" etc. and not sharing and why not helping - there's only one thing to do : send the drive in and see what is the outcome / report as some failures are unrecoverable. Or willing to pay OR TRADE for the know how saying "ok, show your stuff ! ". Plain and simple. Personally, from OUR professional point of view - speaking in general - we are maybe just tired of "DEJA MOO" (*) and of childish attempts of end users or pseudo-geeks telling lies to get truth. That's why most of the times we simply ignore....

(*) = "I have heard that bullshit before"

Everyone was at this stage at some point. It is a slow process and despite the enthusiasm and eagerness to do well, it is never going to be anything except slow. You dont have modern tools to support F3 series, how can you complain about people not sharing knowledge when you dont have the tools to process it anyway? Assuming I were to give you step by step instructions on some specific solution, how could you then go and implement it, or learn from it?

You couldnt without the relevant tools.

This isnt me 'marketing' tools, this is you not having the nessecary initiative to get the tools you would need to learn. Then you blame everyone except yourself because they are pro-active and prefer to seek solutions themselves as opposed to demand them from this forum...



Maybe, but you would need to definitely know what your doing and how to do it, also would need to be done via terminal as you have no other means to access it, one mis-interpretation or mistake in calculation and you could make matters much much worse. Also, some 'chains' of defects run for a specified length, how could you replicate this during importing? You would need to break list down into hundreds of individual defects and import one by one? Even then, there is no guarantee that it will be done right.

Ok totally understand u guys and ur point of view on "newbies"

But now , i would not spend 20000$ on a tool without knowing for sure it will fix any drive i get my hands on , and from the manuals i read ( original in russian , what a pain in the ass that was) i haven`t been able to find any way of refurbing a F3 drive after DR . And i`m not talking about very damaged drives , i usualy get working drives with smart status bad , relocated sectors count high ,

So other cheaper tools who u advice me to start with ? STR-3000 ? SEdiv? SalvationData? and specify the prices pls

BTW i got that old PC3000 form an old Computer-Service who closed activity , i payd "3 beers money" on it , but since i can't fix any new drives with it , it`s worth ZERO to me .

@ hddguy

Regarding manual translation via terminal , as i read from the terminal diagnostic command sheet i have , u can specify the PBA count , same goes for translating Physical sectors or logical ones.

PS. can some MOD move this into a new topic ?

This is a risk many people have taken, and for most it pays off, for small amount of others it required too much commitment and learning.

You want some cheaper alternative, but I say you get what you pay for.

Each time you do see someone say "go spend $2,000 on this" - they are not referring to STR or HD Doctor. You have already old PC3000 version so you should know already of its potential so if your serious about DR why do you even consider a "downgrade" to STR or SD?

Try to work on some old drives that it does support (I assume its PCI version, running from windows?) and then you will learn the value of it and this gives you a much better starting point to develop further

yes i know of it`s potential as a tool , no doubt it`s best one available

But as i sayd before , i`m interested mostly in refurbing the drives that come with BAD SMART and bad sectors , nothing really badly damaged , with burnt PCB , bad heads , rom swap , and this kind of problems . it takes to much time and resources to fix those kind of drives , so i wanna stick to fixing the "Easy" ones . Usualy here , when a hdd starts developing bad sectors is considered bad , and most people change it when they see HDD sentinel reporting low life and smart errors. I wanna fix only those drives .

As an example , a 500GB drive in good condition( no smart errors) sells for 25-30$, I can`t charge someone for a fixing a drive anything more than 10$ or maybe 15$ for a 500GB drive . So i would need to fix alot of drives to pay-off for the tool ( pc 3000) and go on profit . Yes it`s the DR part also , but how much can u charge someone for a couple of photos ? 50$? 100$ ? still would take alot of those to get back the money i`d spend on the tool

By now i have sucessfuly fixed a couple of WD drives and in my opinion they are the easyest to refurb if they had only some bad sectors that needed to be merged from G to P after logical scan , even cutting bad heads it`s simple on WD`s

And the fixed WD`s after intense testing ( about 2 weeks of strss ) gone in old generation computers that been donated


I don`t wanna get rich from this line of work , but not go broke either from it , i get alot of older scrap PC components that need fixing , or they work and i make computers that i later donate

hddguy, Could you help to fix "not seen seagate in BIOS"?

My disk is ST31000528AS. Suddenly stopped to recognized by BIOS. I could exchange with pcb via UART. After going to connection disk report like:
Rst20M
No HOST FIS-ReadyStatusFlags 2002B001
ASCII Diag mode

V40 command response " there is no records.."

Is there any way to unlock BSY state for it?
Thanks

if V40 reports no entry it`s safe for u to use the tutorial further

I'm newbie here, sorry, and let me know where is it, tutorial?

OK, I was not right
Actually drive response for V40 command was:

Nonresident GList 0 entries returned
Total entries available: 0
PBA Len Flags Phy Cyl Hd PhySctr SFI

Thanks. guru-guys
You all were very responsible, smart and pretty to exchange info with newcomer

Any way I fix my ST31000528AS from BSY status!!!!
Keep your secrets and be proud

All, who need a help, welcome! May it will helpful and for you.

The tutorial or solution , how u wanna call it was on 1st page of this topic hope u found it

My hdd is working again after 4 months in deep sleep. I recovered all my 2TB !

I used the command presented by "finity" in the beginning and it worked after a few tries.

I had to short two pins and I used a tweezer for this (very handy, didnt work for me with other tools).

Spildit, your advise to entre a V40 command allowed me to be less worried issuing the m command.


Thank you all