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Lacie D2 External Hard Drive suddenly won't appear on desktop or profiler??

I started my Mac today- and my external firewire 500 gig LacieD2 did not appear on my desktop. I went to Disk Utilities, and it is not showing up. In the profiler- it is listed as Unknown Device? The blue light is continually flashing. I unplugged it- turned off my computer, waited, and reconnected it. Still nothing. Is this hard drive dead? I have essential information on it that I cannot loose.

Dual 867 mhz power PC G4, Mac OS X (10.4.11), Lacie D2 500gig firewire

Posted on Mar 4, 2009 8:37 AM

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9 replies

Mar 4, 2009 8:50 AM in response to Michael DiGiorgio

Not showing up at all in Disk Utilities is not a good sign at all. I also don't think that blue light should be flashing.

One web site suggests it may be the power adapter which I recall is prone to problems with these drives. You'd have to find a new one somewhere. At least this means the data on the drive may still be okay.

http://forums.techguy.org/hardware/578214-problem-lacie-external-120g-hard.html

It might also be time to think about getting a backup drive for the external drive if your data is that important. 😉 I think LaCie is going through a rough patch and I read a lot of reports about problems with their drives.

There could also be other issues, some of which are mentioned here:

http://www.darcynorman.net/2006/01/24/lacie-big-disk-extreme-failure/

Do you hear sounds of the drive spinning?

Message was edited by: Limnos

Mar 4, 2009 9:36 AM in response to Michael DiGiorgio

I hear it spinning- I think?

That may not be so good because it suggests the power is getting to it and it is something else more critical to the functioning of the drive that is wrong. If it is the enclosure you could try moving it out of the enclosure into a different one, or into the computer.

I just used Disk Warrior to rebuild the directory- no luck.

Ah, so did Diskwarrior see the drive? I didn't think you could see the drive in Disk Utility.

I also replaced the firewire Cable- no luck.

Good try but the flashing blue light suggested something else to me.

I'm now doing to bring it to a local Computer Store to try to retrieve the information.

Try using an application such as [Data Rescue II|http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php] or [FileSalvage|http://subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?main page=product_info&productsid=1]. Both have free trial versions that let you see if the software will help before you decide to buy. You will also need a second hard drive equal to or larger in size than your first drive.

I wrote to Lacie- but they are so slow in responding- it will be days.

Ummmm....

Mar 4, 2009 12:03 PM in response to Limnos

I just tried both Data Rescue II , no luck.
It seems like to is definitely a hardware problem.
The good part is the Lacie Hard Drive is under warranty. the bad part is I need the data off it.
I do have a second 500 gig hard drive- so I'm heading down to the local computer store to bite the bullet and get my files off it so I can send it back to Lacie.
I'll post what the computer store tells me.
Thanks so much for all of your suggestions- extremely helpful!

Mar 4, 2009 12:09 PM in response to Michael DiGiorgio

Good luck at the computer store and do report back. I'm under the impression they will take it into the back room and try using DataRescue too, so it will be interesting to ask what they actually tried.

There are data recovery services out there that can rescue data from almost any drive, but they are very, very expensive. e.g. http://www.drivesavers.com/ none of them actually have any prices on their web sites but I believe you could be talking at least $1000

Apr 4, 2009 11:30 AM in response to Michael DiGiorgio

I have had problems with 2 different LaCie 500 gb d2 Quadra drives: after about a year or so, the drive spontaneously ejected, and could not be remounted. One drive contained only back-up data, so I threw it out. The second one, however, had a few very important files, and I had to send it to Salvagedata.com. They had to rebuild the drive, and were able to retrieve all of the data - but at a cost of over $1300!

Web searches I made showed many anecdotal reports of LaCie 500 gb quadra drives failures, a problem that does not seem to affect LaCie's larger capacity drives to the same degree. Recently I helped a friend install a new LaCie 500 gb quadra, and noticed that the power supply brick and connection are completely different now.

I'm replacing my LaCie with a 1.5 tb G-safe (RAID-1) drive.

Apr 5, 2009 1:27 PM in response to Kuma-kun

I had the same thing happen with a LaCie 500 gb d2. It freaked me out cause System 10 on my G5 was asking me to reformat it. Instead I moved the drive to my G4 computer which read it just fine. No problems at all.
So I've been moving the stuff on that D2 drive to another drive to move back to the G5 and to another external drive. Not a LaCie. That the G4 doesn't see.

May 12, 2009 11:49 PM in response to Michael DiGiorgio

Michael,

Were you ever able to revive your drive? I have the same drive and have been experiencing some similar issues. I have still been able to mount the drive using a Firewire 800 cable but the Firewire 400 cable has been sketchy. Also, it mounted once when I turned the drive from a horizontal position to a vertical position.

If you're still checking this thread, let me know if you ended up getting yours to work. I read another thread about the power adapter failing and it wouldn't surprise me if I'm having the same issue.

Dave

Lacie D2 External Hard Drive suddenly won't appear on desktop or profiler??

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