As an enthusiast  Open Hardware supporter, I regularly read the always brilliant Dangerous Prototype blog.
Last week it featured a short but complete tutorial about unbricking a Seagate Dockstar with OpenOCD and the Bus Pirate.

The Bus Pirate is an open source hacker multi-tool that talks to electronic stuff, and which can be used as a JTAG adaptor (and much more!).
OpenOCD, the widespread free JTAG debugger, recently gained support for it.

The good news is that, after almost a year and half of development, OpenOCD 0.5.0 has been finally released and is currently available in both Debian testing and unstable. Get it from the repository while it is hot, no need to fiddle with autotools and build tools anymore 🙂

As a side-note for interested parties, SWD (Serial Wire Debugging) support is currently under development, along with its companion library (libswd).

Hack and enjoy!