unbricked

Many months ago, our external hard disk died, taking along with it over 400GB of our family's photos and videos and many other miscellaneous data.  Bummer.

Many months later, I Googled the serial number of the offending hard disk and discovered that I was one of thousands of lucky people who purchased a Seagate 7200.11 Barracuda with shoddy firmware that causes the drive to cease up without warning.  In the business they call it a "bricked" drive because the hard disk has turned into a brick.

Indeed, there is a monstrous 4800-message thread dating back five years ago and flooded with poor saps like me whose life work was entombed in a bricked Seagate.

Amazingly, some hard core tech nerds discovered how to reset the firmware and "unbrick" the disks.  Much of the discussion in that thread is tech nerds walking dumb users through the procedure.  It is not for the faint of heart.

The first solutions I read involved soldering.  Fortunately, I soon discovered a very user-friendly description of a variant of the procedure that does not require soldering.  The author tells us exactly which parts we need and where to order them.  I spent about $50 in parts.  Here's what it looks like.

You see that white piece of paper on the hard disk?  The one with a corner wedged underneath the green circuit board?  That piece of paper is breaking the contact between the circuit board and the disk's motor.  In order to unbrick the hard disk I had to power-up the disk and talk to its firmware using the parts I bought.  Then I had to remove the paper to restore the contact while power was still flowing to the disk before issuing more commands to complete the procedure.

Apparently, over 4000 hard disks have been unbricked using this procedure.  Incredible.

I hit a bit of a snag at the very final step.  The key command that fixes the drive is m0,2,2,0,0,0,0,22 .  The instructions are very clear that under no circumstances should power to the drive be cut until this command has finished executing.  The command normally takes 1-10 minutes to execute.  I waited for 90 minutes.  I finally gave up and unplugged the drive before the command finished executing, expecting to lose all our photos.

Fortunately, the procedure worked the second time round.  For anyone else performing this procedure, the instructions say, "At this point, many say you need to disconnect the SATA power cable from the drive ... There is a bit of debate about this step in the forums but that is what I did and it worked fine in my case."  I was wary of disconnecting power in the middle of open-heart surgery, so I opted for the keep-power-on route in my first attempt.  Do not keep the power on.  Cut the power like the instructions tell you to.  It'll save you waiting 90 minutes for a command that will never finish and yet cannot be interrupted lest you fry your disk.

So yeah, I'm pretty proud of my ability to follow instructions that others worked so hard to create.  If anyone else has a bricked Seagate hard disk, I'm your man.  Sue, Jeff, I'm looking in your direction.