Aug 7, 2016 - Igor: Dealing with terminal commands and serial ports on a hard drive. I was given a demonstration the other day when a Seagate drive (with. I have a Seagate stand alone hard drive Serial No. 5MT2VSFZ, PART #9BD862-560, which I have been using without problem for some time. Recently, the hard drive is not recognized by my computer. I have plugged it directly into a wall outlet with the USB connection plugged directly into a usb port on the computer; not into a separate multi usb port device.
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When your friends and family are asking you: “So, how did you spend your weekend?”, wouldn’t you want to be able to hold your head up and proudly say: “I had successfully un-bricked my Seagate 7200.11 hard drive, what did you do?”. I’ve found myself in a strong need of a SATA drive and the only ones I had on hand were two Seagate ST31000340AS 1000GBytes drives of the Barracuda 7200.11 clan that had silently died in my RAID array over the course of last year.
I bought the replacements but it looked quite odd that the original ones died before reaching 18 months of age and I kept them safely in a box until I had time (and strong enough need) to try and figure out what’s wrong with them. It turns out, I was not the only one having problems with these drives (far from it) and many people have successfully repaired them and posted enough detail on the Net for someone else to repeat the procedure.
This post is not meant to be a detailed description of the procedure and the underlying issues with the drive’s firmware – there are many places where you can read about it and I’ll provide links below – this post describes just one way of doing it. I also wanted to illustrate that, although most instructions call for the use of a Serial-to-TTL adapter, there are other devices that can take its place.
Also, most of instructions I’ve seen are based on Windows software and I thought Linux users like myself could use some more references A disclaimer is in order here: if you bought your drive in retail and have no problem with sending it back to Seagate and waiting for them to fix the drive, they are happy to fix it for you provided by you are willing to jump through some (usual amount of) hoops. There is a describing the procedure. Also, this fix only applies to drives stuck in BSY mode ( Seagate-talk for “busy”).
![Seagate Hard Drive Serial Port Seagate Hard Drive Serial Port](http://blog.atola.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/seagate-IDE-3.5-arrow.png)
It manifests itself in drive not being found in BIOS at all. I imagine there could be any number of issues with a HD – some people reported these drives a recognized in BIOS but with zero size – this fix will not work on those, only the ones bricked because of the BSY bug in the firmware. The fix is based on communicating with the drive’s controller via the auxiliary serial port on the back. This is not a fully-featured RS-232 serial interface (no need for it in an internal device like the hard drive) and it operates on TTL signal level. However, it uses the same protocol that RS-232 does and therefore you can “talk” to it using the serial port terminal applications such as GTKTerm, cutecom, minicom and others (or “HyperTerminal” or putty if you’re on Windows).
If you are running Ubuntu and don’t have a serial port terminal application installed, now is the time to type: sudo apt-get install gtkterm in your terminal. Cable I used to hook up Seagate 7200.11 Serial TTL interface The connector has pins on 2mm centers, not the more common 0.1inch (2.54mm), so it’s slightly smaller and it really is hard to find a matching female part. I got lucky and found some old CD-ROM cable from a Compaq PC in my odds and ends bin that looked like it could work. The cable had the right amount of pins (3) and the right distance between pins in the smaller connector, but that was it. Everything else was wrong: the slot positions the pins took as well as the external size of the small connector was all wrong.
After half an hour of toiling with an Exacto knife I was able to remove the contacts, rearrange them in the order needed as well as trim the body of the connector to just the right size to insert into the socket on the drive. I wish I had a more elegant solution (like the exact matching female end) but this had to do for expediency. The USB-to-LCD device I've converted to USB-to-TTL Serial I did not have a specialized Serial-to-TTL adapter and also happened that I could not locate a USB-Serial converter that could be further converted into a suitable TTL adapter and so I had to look around for any USB-attached device that looked like it could do the job. The eureka moment came when I looked at a USB-powered LCD display I had laying around – a rather failed project because of the small size of the LCD display (16×2) that made it rather inconvenient to use for displaying songs playing in Rhythmbox (too much scrolling). The USB control board and the LCD display came from a Chinese company called “SURE Electronics”.
Anyways, the device worked as intended, I just needed a larger display and so I switched to a different USB-LCD display, this time 20×2, and so the Sure Electronics display was just laying around doing nothing useful. USB-LCD Device ports Flipping the control board around reveals a nicely labeled Serial TTL port that has no header soldered but appears to be connected to the Silicon Labs CP2102 RS232 serial adaptor IC. If you are using this or similar device, be careful and trace the connections from Tx and Rx pins – since this device was designed to only receive commands from PC and never send anything back, only the Tx circuit was completed (IC’s transmit labeled as Tx becomes the PIC’s receive so it’s actually a part of the device’s receiving circuit – the labeling could be confusing). The Rx circuit had two SMT resistors missing but in this application I saw no use for the resistors and simply shortened the pads with solder. Now a small Linux-related digression. Upon plugging the device into a USB port the system immediately recognized it and assigned it to the /dev/ttyUSB0 device. GTKTerm also immediately saw the new device but the loopback test would not work!
It took me an hour or so to figure out that, although the default usbserial Linux driver recognized the device, it actually needed the specialized cp210x driver to work properly. The cp210x driver should be loaded before the device is plugged in or it won’t work. I only use this device occasionally and so I never cared to set this module up to load automatically but you can add it to /etc/modules if you use it often. So, first run lsmod grep cp210x if you don’t see cp210x mentioned in the output like this BIGRIG:$ lsmod grep cp210x cp210x 13070 0 usbserial 39131 1 cp210x then load it manually via sudo modprobe cp210x These are GTKTerm settings you should configure for talking to the hard drive. Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 prepared for BSY fix Here is an unsightly picture of the entire rig assembled together and ready for application of the fix. The drive sits on top of a Mini-ITX case with a power supply I’m using to power the drive. Once fixed, it will be installed in there.
The green croc cable is creating a common ground (bond, rather) between the GND connector on the USB adapter in the lower right corner and the metal of the Mini-ITX case. I’ve also been using the anti-static strap (yellow, below the drive) for just in case. Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hooked up and ready to be fixed OK, so GTKTerm is up, USB-TTL adapter is powered via USB and recognized by the system, everything is hooked up and ready to go. Things that happen after that should happen in order, so I’ll begin an ordered list.
Turn on the drive, watch for the sound of the plates spinning up. As soon as the drive has gone up to speed, hit Ctrl-Z From this point on things you type will be in bold. What you type is case sensitive!
You should now see a command line prompt from the drive like this: F3 T If you don’t see the prompt but the loopback test of the USB-to-TTL adapter worked fine (short Tx and Rx, connect to the adapter and start typing with local echo in “OFF”. If you see what you type – loopback test worked), you may need to swap Tx and Rx wires. In many cases the labels are not very clear about which transmit or receive do they mark – the network’s or the device’s, which goes in opposite direction. Let’s assume you got the prompt now. Now go into Access Level 2 by typing /2 F3 T /2ENTER F3 2. Wait 20-30 seconds before the next step.
Spin down the motor by typing Z F3 2 ZENTER Spin Down Complete Elapsed Time 0.148msecs F3 2 If you see things like Invalid Diagnostic Command or LED:000000CC FAddr:0025DF67 Then you haven’t waited long enough in the step #3. Simply power down the hard drive and start over.
Until you remove the cardstock piece, starting over is easy – just power it down and restart from Step #1. Once you see the “Spin Down Complete” confirmation, carefully slide the card stock from under the PCB, then replace and tighten all the three remaining screws. Remember that when you are doing it, the HD is live and you can short an unfortunate circuit if you drop a metal screw on it. Issue the Spin Up command by typing “U”: F3 2 UENTER Spin Up Complete Elapsed Time 9.593 secs F3 2 Note that spin up takes longer than spin down, so give it time. Go to Control Level 1 by typing /1 F3 2 /1ENTER F3 1. Create a new S.M.A.R.T.
Sector by typing N1: F3 1 N1ENTER F3 1. It’ll take a little while for the prompt to come back. When it does, power down the hard drive.
Wait a few seconds (as is always recommended with electronics) and power it back on. Do the Ctrl-Z again and get the first prompt, then to partition regeneration (nothing gets deleted from the drive – not to worry) F3 T m0,2,2,0,0,0,0,22ENTER Max Wr Retries = 00, Max Rd Retries = 00, Max ECC T-LEvel = 00, Max Certify Rewrite Retries = 0000 user Partition Format 5% complete, Zone 00, Pass 00, LBA 00004339, ErrCode 00000080, Elapsed Time 0 mins 05 secs User Partition Format Successful - Elapsed Time 0 mins 05 secs F3 T Be sure to wait until you see the “Successful” confirmation. Turn the drive off Here is how the entire session looks like in GTKTerm. Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 BSY Fix - GtkTerm successful session You can now use your drive to back up the data from it.
Be sure to understand that the drive it not yet permanently fixed at this point even though it’s operational. The conditions that led to its breakdown in the first place are still there. To permanently fix the issue you will now have to proceed to Seagate’s site, and perform the update.
The good news is: now that your drive is operational, you can actually perform the upgrade! Thank you for stopping by, Mathew! I was just trying to make do with what was at hand. Once I learned (from your blog) that there is a fix, I could not wait for a proper USB-TTL adapter to come in.
Funny thing though: a year later I still don’t have a dedicated USB-TTL device. Some temporary measures have a way of becoming permanent Next time in a pinch I may resort to taking a TTL output from an Arduino that’s not a part of some other project. I also have a drawer-full of mini 1.5″ LCD key chain picture frames.
I bet every one of those has a USB-TTL onboard as well. Once you start looking, these USB-TTL interfaces appear in all sorts of other seemingly unrelated electronic devices. It incredibly worked like a charm!!! I followed step by step and got my ST31000340AS unbricked and ready to update from SD15 to SD1A firmware. The only difference in my procedure was cutting a guide in the cardstock which let me screw better the pcb still allowing the paper card to slide smoothly and straight not being necessary any masking tape at all because the screws were a bit loose (but only a bit) and used a Nokia CA-42 cable as shown in Thank you very much!!! You have saved my 100% healthy hdd!!!
Not sure about the cable to be honest but I think you can broad your search by looking for similar cables on places like eBay. I’ve seen part numbers like DKU5B or DKU-5B mentioned as “clones” for the Nokia CA-42 cables. Maybe it will be easier to find a DKU5B. From what I can tell, it’s based on the same chip that the device I describe here – the PL2303 chip. So if you were looking for Linux drivers, it’s in this post.
If you’re looking for Windows, I was able to find this on the Net. I have neither a Windows machine nor a Nokia cable for that matter but give it a try, other people say it worked. Thanks for stopping!
Well, I’m in PA, so not much help here but you may still want to give it a try. Before you can do any real damage, you can play with it all the way up to the Step 2 – that’s where you see the F3 T prompt. And, honestly, once you got there and saw the prompt, you’re almost there anyway. It requires no special skills, really, even though some equipment, such as a power supply you can hook the drive up to, could be useful. And the USB-TTL adapter of course, but, like I said in the post, you may already have one disguised as a device of some sort that attaches to USB. You may want to post a request for help in our in case someone from MN may be surfing. Thanks for stopping by, Salim.
I honestly don’t think the BSY bug error, which is what this method is intended to fix, is the source of your problems. The “Spin Error” message that you get after issuing the “U” command appears to suggest that there’s a problem with the motor control circuitry.
![Hard Hard](http://blog.atola.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/DiskSense-Back-Side-circle.jpg)
Maybe the disks cannot achieve the RPMs needed for proper operation? Do you hear the disks spin at all? Anyway, the error messages you are seeing are not the ones you’d see in case of a BSY bug error, so the method described in this posts is not likely to help. However, you can do further search for the diagnostic output you get like Error 1009 DETSEC 00006008 R/W Status 2 Error 84150180 and maybe you can find explanation of what these mean and that will point you to the right direction.
I’m by no means an expert in Seagate firmware terminal commands but I did put together a short list of those commands here: and also there’s a complete listing that the drive itself spits out when queried in that post. As far as I understand it, the T command can mean several different things based on what menu level you’re actually on when you issues it. Check full command printout for how the drive itself explains it. All descriptions are highly abbreviated, unfortunately, but you may be able to glean some useful info from the abbreviations. By the way, regarding your error ( Error 1009 DETSEC 00006008 ) you reported earlier, did you do some Internet search?