Dead LaCie pocket drive

[rhinosaur]

My LaCie pocket drive (60GB) seems to have died on me. When plugged in via FireWire or USB (with the power adapter) I only get an amber light. When I put my ear to the drive I can hear it spin up and stop, spin up and stop. Not a good sign, eh? I'm pretty sure the drive is toast, but it isn't that old (not even 2 years) and even though it's a portable it was rarely moved around much - usually between workstations. The drive was originally used as a completed jobs disd - it would move between workstations to allow people to archive complete work before being archived to DVD.

Just recently I moved it to our back up station to use with Retrospect. It's currently the biggest HD we have outside of internals on our workstations - so it was ideal as a temporary Retrospect drive (we're looking into tape or other solutions at the moment). Now it's dead I'm not too concerned about the Retrospect data - I'll just start another set on another drive this evening - but I hate to give up on this drive just yet. Is there anything I can do to fix, repair or otherwise test to see if the drive is really dead?

 

[chornbe]

That sounds like the actual drive and not the interface. Good news is all those housings are just interfaces and the drives are all standard and easily replaced if you so choose to do so. Might be worth opening and checking... the drive itself *might* have a manufacturer's 3 or 5 year warranty, whereas the whole assembly might only have a one year thru' Lacie. It's worth checking. If it's Seagate or Western Digital, they're both GREAT to work with for warranty situations (at least they were when I was doing more hardware work).