Unlocking my ST310014ACE Completed

As my followers know, I was given a locked Seagate ST310014ACE hard drive that came from an Xbox. Because it was locked I could not FDisk or Format it or use it in any way in a computer. I found a hardware solution written by cyd0g. That diagram calls for a Max232 integrated circuit chip which I don't have and could not buy locally. In my Silly Project post I decided I could use a couple of chips from an old serial card to perform the same function as the Max232.

I drew up a diagram for a circuit which would do the same thing as cyd0g's original. You can see my progress here, here, here and here with the last one of those reporting success.

This post shows the final stages of unlocking the ST310014ACE hard drive. Here is a closeup picture of the front side of my completed circuit board. It's kind of a spaghetti mess of wires, but it did work.

And here is the back side of the board. I did a very poor job of soldering, but again, oh well, it worked.

I'm including this next picture which shows the whole set up even tho I already have it in my previous post.

In the upper left is an ATX power supply. I connected four wires from my board to the power supply to get the ground, -12 volt, +12 volt and +5 volt which I needed. On the right is my connection to the RS-232 serial cable which goes to Com Port 1 of my computer. The wires running to the hard drive are plugged into the 8 pin connector where you usually have jumpers to set the drive's configuration for master, slave or cable select. Notice that the power connector for the drive itself is not plugged in yet. This is important.

So, with the computer running, I turned on the ATX power supply and then went into the Hyper Terminal program. The first step is to name the connection. I chose "Seagate" just like cyd0g recommended. Here is the next screen which pops up. It has defaulted to "Direct to Com1" like I wanted.

After clicking "OK", it then comes up with the properties dialog box. The defaults are all ok except for the "Bits per second" which was at 2400. I changed it to 9600 per cyd0g's instructions.

After clicking "OK" for that screen the following relatively un-exciting one appears. The sweet part is in the lower left where it shows "Connected".

Now is when I plugged the power connector into the ST310014ACE hard drive and then the good part begins.

At this point I pressed Ctrl-Z to get the terminal prompt so I could type in the required commands.

Then, per cyd0g's document, I typed the following:

T>/2 (Enter)
2>S006b (Enter)
2>R21,01 (Enter)
2>C0,570 (Enter)
2>W20,01 (Enter)

And it looks like this:

I then closed Hyper Terminal, shut off the ATX power supply and disconneted the ST310014ACE hard drive. I put the jumper back on pins 5-6 to enable cable select and put the drive into another computer. I booted from a floppy disk to a DOS prompt and ran the FDisk program. Yay! I could now access the drive and I selected the "Display partition information" option. There were no partitions defined. Again, good. I then created a primary dos partition and made it active. After the required reboot, I formatted the drive and ran scandisk on it with a full surface scan. It passed these tests flawlessly with no bad sectors reported.

Although the time I spent on this far outweighs the value of the drive, I enjoyed it because I was able to design my own serial programmer circuit based on cyd0g's original and which used parts I already had. I also got experience in soldering wires to a printed circuit board and best of all, I got the satisfaction of it all working out just like I hoped it would.

*Jessie dances around with a big smile on her face.* :D