Lacie External HDD no longer mounts

T

thendis

Registered
Hello!

My Lacie External Firewire HDD (porche design model) no longer mounts on my eMac G4 800. I turn it on but nothing happens.

This is very strange because I only used it about 2 hours agoto back some files up, and have never had any problems with it in the 8 months i've used it.

Any ideas? so far tried only obvious stuff (unplug, reboot, change slots)

Thanks in advance :)

Using:
OS X 10.3.7
(was 10.3.6 when problems began, upgraded to 10.3.7 in attempt at fixing problem)
 
no, disk util can't see it. so strange. what could have happened, do you think? I could undertsand if i dropped it or something...
 
I found this on Macfixit.com:
FireWire drive issues: Personal File Sharing link A good number of readers have experienced problems with FireWire drives since installing the Update, including an inability to mount such drives. Keith Bumgarner describes a FireWire problem that, in his case, appears to be linked to Personal File Sharing and is fixed by installing OS X 10.3 on the affected drive:

"We've had some intermittent problems with Firewire drives not mounting but traced all of the problems to Macs with Personal File Sharing enabled. After a FireWire drive (800 or 400) was subjected to an environment where Personal File Sharing was active, it would behave 'badly' on any Mac, sometimes taking forever to mount, sometimes not at all, sometimes only after a couple of on/off cycles. Formatting and reformatting the drive, even with different disk structures, did not help, nor did tinkering with any aspect of the OS (we ran 10.3.5-10.3.7 during all of this and found no difference in the degree of problem due to OS version). Various directory repairs and O&P adjustments did nothing either. What we did finally discover was that writing OS 10.3.x to a drive 'gone south' completely resurrected it. The drives we ended up testing and repeating the problem with were one Western Digital 120GB in a custom case from Granite, and two Maxtor 320GB and 465GB [drives], controller firmware rev912 (Oxford).

"Since [installing OS X 10.3] to the drives the problems have completely cleared up with no repeat occurrence. All drives mount perfectly now no matter the circumstances or hardware. The Macs we tested this all on were a desktop G5 dual 1.8GHz, a new iMac G5 20", an older 450MHz dual G4, and a 15" Titanium 667MHz PowerBook. We can even initialize the drive after the OS install and it's still OK; there's no need for the OS to be present on the drive. We can, however, start the cycle all over again by simply enabling Personal File Sharing on any of these Macs while the drive(s) are connected and mounted. The problems start upon the very next reboot after enabling Personal File Sharing. (Simply turning off Personal File Sharing did not help the problem.)"
Click to expand...
Perhaps trying something like that will work...

Also, Macintouch.com has been covering similar firewire drive problems:
http://macintouch.com/panreader50.html
 
"What we did finally discover was that writing OS 10.3.x to a drive 'gone south' completely resurrected it."

Is that suggesting I install 10.3 to the External HDD, or re-installing 10.3 to my internal HDD do you think? Coz it seems a little dumb to be suggesting you install something to a drive that won't mount in the first place?!

Either way, thank you very much for the info. I will try formatting and re-installing the OS on my internal and see what happens. Must be careful when installing updates and enabling file sharing in the future.

Will have to wait a day or two for some downloads and encoding to finish, but will post back here with result when I am done. Seems to be quite a common problem. I have read many posts on it, with no answers found as yet.

Cross your fingers!
cheers again.
 
You might wanna take a look at the second link as well, as it offers workarounds that don't require re-installing.

I interpreted the first part as installing 10.3 on the external drive -- the one that won't mount. I think he's saying that installing 10.3 on the external drive put new drivers on the external drive (one of the things that is done when OS X is installed) and that allowed the drive to be "seen" again. I don't think reinstalling 10.3 on the internal drive is gonna do any good, but it's worth a shot -- I would try all the other workarounds first before wiping your system drive.
 
Figured out what the problem was.

Turns out it wasn't the Mac afterall. The HDD itself is fine, but the casing is dead. Either the powersuppy is broken or the cable. Anyway, I borrowed a friend's external HDD and swapped HDDs. The Lacie one mounted fine when using the other casing, thus it was the casing all along.

Relif aside, I'm a little disappointed at LaCie, this is the forth time something like this has happened with one of their products (twice with an external DVD-RW and once with an internal DVD-R DL). I don't like to say straight out that they make inferior products, because i'm sure there are people with good LaCie experiences, but I'm somewhat annoyed at them myself.

Thanks so much for your help tho, much appreciated.
 
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