LaCie 500G Firewire 800 problems

[pedz]

I have a LaCie 500G drive. I've tried using firewire 800 and firewire 400 and get the same problem.

The drive works fine for a while and then it sounds like it spins down. If I try to do a large copy, it goes for about 10 minutes and then hangs. You can hear the drive spin up and then spin back down periodically.

I found the LaCie Update Tool but it tells me that there is another firewire device attached to my system. I have a Quad G5 running 10.4.6 Server. There are no other firewire devices attached. The System Profiler also see the device. It simply says "Unknown Device" Unknown Manufacturer, max speed of 400 Mb/sec.

So, that may be my problem but I am not sure. I had this same symptom on the G4 that I came from but never fixed it.

I'd like to pull the data off the drive to a SATA hard disk.

One option is to do the update from my laptop but, of course, the instructions for the update say to have a backup first. But I can't make a backup. Thats the problem.

Any suggestion of what to try? I can slowly pull data over using small copies but that is a pain.

Thanks for your help,
pedz

 

[pedz]

Update: I believe that the mysterious firewire 400 device is my 30" screen somehow. It has a firewire hub in it.

I did the update of the firmware but the drive still has problems.

Still trying to figure out a way to solve the problem of the drive spinning down.

Thanks