LaCie d2 External won't show up - help!

F

Frost123

Registered
I've had my LaCie d2 for a little over two years and haven't had any problems with it. All of the sudden it won't show up on my hard drive.

When I plug it into the firewire port, I can hear the drive spin up and load, but nothing appears on the desktop. I've tried Disk Warrior and Disk Utility - neither one can see the disk. I also tried swapping firewire cords - same thing.

I also tried to plug in my ipod to see if it might be a problem with my Powerbook's firewire port - the ipod loads fine.

When I turn on the drive, it spins up and sounds normal...

Very pissed off here...in the past I've been to at least see a drive if it doesn't mount, but there's literally nothing for this one.

Please advise...
 
Some LaCie hard drives that reported this kind of behavior didn't have problems with the hard drive or case at all -- rather, the power supplies were going bad or something was wrong with the power cords.

Do you have any luck "jiggling" the power cord around, or holding it in different positions where it connects to the drive? You may also want to contact LaCie about this and inquire about known defective power supplies or the like.
 
the drive powers up just fine - and here's the odd thing: when i plug it in and connect it to the computer, it spins up as if it's being detected - however if i shut down the computer or restart it, the drive doesn't shut down or restart as it usually does.

I tried the jiggle suggestion - no go.

I did call LaCie yesterday and as soon as they discovered that the drive was out of warranty, they were extremely dismissive of any wrongdoing on LaCie's part - the rep offered some hypothesis, but said that it was too difficult to tell given my description.
 
no...it doesn't see it. :/

any suggestions would be greatly appreciated - i have a ton of data on there that i need...
 
Well, if all else fails, you can go pick up an empty hard drive case, and move the hard drive in the LaCie case into the new one.

http://www.dealmac.com usually has some good deals on external drive cases. You can usually find a firewire case for about $40
 
I had an external LaCie 320GB Big Disk Extreme that failed, one of the internal hard drives failed (it's a stiped RAID array). LaCie replaced all of the components in the drive case except the drives themselves, and the drive still didn't work. I sent the drive to Ontrack.com for data recovery ($2500) + ($250) for another identical hard drive, this time it's a LaCie 500GB Big Disk Extreme. DriverSavers.com wanted $3,500 for data recovery. If data recovery is what you need, then go with ontrack.com.

It sounds like your external enclosure has failed, not the drives. When my drives started to fail, I'd hear a click or two and the drive would powerdown and I'd get a message from the Finder that the drive unmounted unexpectedly with possible data loss. Incidentally, Ontrack.com never found any errors on the platters, just some small chip on the hard drive mother board burned up, there is inadequate ventilation/cooling for those particular LaCie drives.
 
It is better to spin down the drive when idle? I recently changed my setting for my Lacie External, to not spin down!
 
OWC and some others say leave the drive spinning, only shut down at night. Mechanical failure is more associated with on/off cycles than any other factor, apparently (except excessive heat- if the fan goes, don't use it at all).
 
Be careful when you're updating your system, though, like with the new 10.4.6 updater if you choose to update... it's highly recomended (and possibly, required) that you power-off and disconnect any and all FireWire devices before running a Mac OS X system updater.

FireWire drives, for some reason, do not like being mounted/powered-on when Mac OS X system updates are applied.
 
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