Friday, September 30, 2011

Unlocking a Seagate ST310014ACE Hard Drive - Step 3

I've completed the next step in my quest of unlocking a Seagate ST310014ACE hard drive and that is gathering of all the parts I need.  As you may recall from my Silly Project post, I have an old PII-108 RS-232 serial card which has the integrated circuit chips I plan to use in my Serial Programmer Circuit Design. This picture shows the GD75188 and GD75189A chips on that board:



I went to Radio Shack and picked up items 276-159, 276-1538 and 276-1539 today. Here's a picture of them:



For the connection to the ATX power supply, I'm planning to use the pass-thru part of a case fan connector. I think I can use my needle-nosed tweezers and pinch the pins so I can slide each wire out of the connector hood.  That will let me plug each one into the appropriate hole in the ATX connector.  The next picture shows that and an audio cable. It's the one that goes from a sound card to a CD or DVD drive for playing music CDs. I will cut the wire midway and that will give me two 4 pin connectors to plug into the Xbox's hard drive communication port.



Step 4 will be to de-solder the two IC chips from the old board and then build the circuit I've designed.  (Remember, it's based on cyd0g's original design and I've merely created an alternate version using different parts.) I'll let you know how that goes when I get there.

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