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Select Your Hard Drive Brand to Begin:

for 7200.11 drives

1) Install drivers for the adapter

2) Be comfortable with PuTTY (Any Windows) or HyperTerminal (Windows 2000, XP)

3) Prepare the hard drive

insulate the board and the drive

Cut a business card in half and then cut a small notch at the end of the business card (optional). The notch is for the plastic post on the connector with metal pins.

Place the card over the connector as shown on the left. This is so we can prevent the board from communicating with the drive for now.

Let the business card hang outside the edge of the drive, we'll be pulling out the business card from underneath the circuit board later.

Put the circuit board back on

Place the circuit board back onto the hard drive, over the business card.

Tighten the two screws shown in the picture. You can omit the other screws all together, or put them in very loosely.

Attach the adapter to the serial port on the drive as shown in the picture.

Connect your independent power supply to the drive. Do NOT turn it on yet. (The SATA power cable is the wider connector, the data cable is the narrrow connector)

4) Get HyperTerminal or PuTTY ready, but don't open the connection yet.

5) Turn on the power to the drive, and connect the adapter to the USB port on the computer.

6) Do the follow in HyperTerminal (keys (case sensitive) you should actually press are in red, things you should see on screen are in blue. Everything else is just additional comments)

Press Ctrl + z, you should get this prompt:

F3 T>

If not, please check if the board is insulated from the drive, and if HyperTerminal / PuTTY are set up correctly.

Type "/2":

F3 T> /2 (enter)

F3 2>

Wait until the drive motor has stopped spinning (around 30 seconds), then type the software command "Z" to power down the motor (even though it is already down):

F3 2> Z (enter)

Spin Down Complete
Elapsed Time 0.153 msecs
F3 2>

Carefully remove the card from between the board and the drive, and screw in the screw that the card was covering.

After you have done that, type "U" in the software

F3 2>U (enter)

Spin Up Complete
Elapsed Time 10.123 secs
F3 2>

Type "/1"

F3 2>/1 (enter)

F3 1>

Erase the S.M.A.R.T. data by typing "N1". This does NOT affect the user data.

F3 1>N1 (enter)

(wait for a while)

F3 1>

Turn off the drive, wait a minute, then turn the drive back on. Connect to the drive with HyperTerminal or PuTTY.

Ctrl + z

F3 T>

Now we have to format the user partitions. Despite its name, this step does NOT format the user data.

F3 T> m0,2,2,0,0,0,0,22 (enter)

(wait for a very long time, up to a few minutes)

User Partition Format Successful - Elapsed Time 3 mins 10 secs