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.