2G Power seat motor bad- how can I move the seat forward?

[Joe Gekko]

Just what it says on the tin. The driver's seat motor in my 2G Eclipse is bad (or disconnected from the rail somehow). If I hook 12V directly to the power wires for the motor you can hear it whirr and click when you move the slider switch, but no movement. I need to remove the seat from the car, but the seat is all the way back and there is no way to access the rearmost inboard bolt for the seat rails.

How can I move the seat forward, without just cutting the thing out with a sawzall? All of the searches I've done for this come up with the super-helpful advice of 'hook power directly to the motor'. Well, I've done that.

Has anyone overcome this problem before? How did you do it?

Note- I'm not totally opposed to the idea of cutting the seat out, but I'd rather not.

 

[Joe Gekko]

Alright. I'm not sure how useful this will be to anyone else that may have this issue in the future, but I was able to manually move the seat by-

Applying 12V from a battery directly to the power leads for the seat motor.
Moving the slider switch to the 'forward' position.
Pushing the seat forward once the motor started whining.

 

[dustyboner]

On 95-96 seats, I just separate the cable from the motor then spin the cable manually

on 97+ seats, just unbolt the motor from the rails (1 bolt on each side) and disconnect it from each rail. Then the seat will slide freely