On Thu, Feb 04, 2010 at 05:53:06AM -0500, Ruben J?nsson wrote:
> > 
> > > I am in the process of trying to recover some data from a hard drive melt
> > > down. The drive is a SATA Seagate Barracuda 7200.7. When pursuing this I have
> > > found that the drive actually has a serial (UART) terminal interface which can
> > > be accessed through the jumper pins without even connecting anything to the
> > > (S)ATA interface. This goes for drives with both the (P)ATA and SATA
> > > interface. 
> > > 
> > > The terminal interface has a ton of commands that are primarily used at 
> > > manufacturing and testing. There exists software that can read data from the
> > > drive using the terminal interface (as part of a recover process) and I assume
> > > it can write data to it also.
> > > 
> > > Even though this might only work on old seagate drives, it is an interesting
> > > idea to have access to (almost) unlimited storage space for a small PIC
> > > through a simple and relatively slow RX/TX serial interface.
> > > 
> > > Has this been done with a PIC or any small micro before?
> > 
> > You might have a look at: 
> > http://justanotherlanguage.org/content/tutorial_pata_hard_disk
> > 
> > Regards, Rob.
> > 
> 
> Thanks for the link but my point was to use the serial TTL RS232 interface and 
> just use 3 pins (RX, TX and GND).

Ruben,

Do you have a link that describes this interface? The Googlenator did not
come up with anything for any reasonable search parameters.

BAJ
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