Fixed the Seagate 7200.11 hard drive with the Bus Pirate

Bill Farrow fixed the Seagate 7200.11 hard drive firmware BSY bug with the Bus Pirate:
I quickly diagnosed the problem down to a dead HDD. A quick google search later and I discover that I have been hit by the well known Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 BSY bug. Too many power cycles on the drive and it stops working.
Using the following DIY guide, I was able to recover the disk drive by connecting to the diagnostic serial port on the drive using my Bus Pirate.
Via Twitter.
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This entry was posted in Bus Pirate and tagged Bus Pirate v3.6, Seagate 7200.11.

Comments
I want to learn how to do this.
Just did this myself with a 5200.3 (st9160821as) that had a false-alarm SMART failure based on “start/stop count” (no bad sectors, no read errors).
- Connect ground, MISO, MOSI pins to the drive – TX/RX pins are the first two in towards the SATA connector. Ground is the third pin. TX/RX are subject to trial and error – if one doesn’t work, try them the other way around. Connecting the pins is the hardest part.
- Connect to the Bus Pirate (115200 baud, as usual).
- Enter “m” to go into mode, select 9600 baud (!) as the baud rate varies – you may need to use baud rate detection and power-up the drive (don’t need to disassemble it and do the paper trick – that just prevented mine from spinning up properly with the “Z”/”U” commands!) to detect the baud rate.
- During mode selection, the hi/lo mode (last option) should be “2″, “normal” – not the default.
- Use “W” to turn on the power supply.
- Enter “(1)” to activate bridge mode without flow control.
- Power up the drive, you should see some introductory information from the drive. If not (and you just see gibberish, but you see *something* come up), you’ve got the wrong baud rate. If you don’t see anything, try swapping Tx/Rx pins.
- “/1″ will enter level 1 mode.
- “N1″ will clear SMART data. And that’s it!