BSY Status Seagate : DIY: Fixing Your 1TB Seagate's BSY Status

I'm you all heard about the recent mess that locked up many Seagate HDDs and renderd them completely useless… More information here on The Inquirer

For many this problem resulted in returning the HDD to Seagate and losing their data. Some, like our brilliant MagicalTux, took the problem more seriously and followed other instructions on how to fix this.

And here's MagicalTux's experience… If you're not skillful enough don’t even think about trying this…



There are dozens of pages explaining how to fix this, the best one I found (and followed is at: MSNF Forum

All the necessary materials (USB TTL, wires, torx screwdriver, etc) were purchased in Akihabara (It took Daimaou and myself quite a while before finding what we needed).

The procedure is rather simple (I used something a bit different from what was written in the article). I placed a business card under the hard disk PCB (printed circuit board) at the connection to the heads, and started the hard disk "as is".

Once booted I told the PCB over the serial port to stop hard disk rotation (to make the next steps easier), removed the business card, and replaced the screws I removed to when placing the business card.

I told the hard disk to resume rotation, and to format smart area (making the hard disk forget about its previous boots, but also making the smart area a mess), then restarted the hard disk (allowing it to load the empty smart) and initialized the smart data.

When finished, I booted another PC with the Seagate firmware update ISO image, and updated the hard disk's firmware to make sure I won't have any problems in the future.