LaCie External HD doesn't mount in Lion

OceansDaughter wrote:

... you'll hear Apple employees tell you to stay away from LaCie drives until there's a fix. ...So that should answer your question. If not, you risk losing everything on your drive.

Hope you learned from this lesson -- otherwise, you, your LaCie products(s), and Lion will all fail. Miserably.

Could you please tell us which LaCie model drive is causing you the trouble. Or are you saying it is all LaCie models that are a problem with Glue??

I am running SL so not seeing the Lion trouble you describe.

I suspect we are dealing with 2 different issues here - the physical drive as you describe it and software compatability issues with Lion and LaCie. Unless you tell us that you removed the software provided by LaCie at setup.

Have you seen http://www.lacie.com/more/?id=10121 about this very issue?

I don't use any of the LaCie software - I zero-out the drives before using and use SuperDuper for backups - so I can't speak to that issue. I am just trying to figure out what the problem here is and how we can avoid it. I have many LaCie d2Quadra drives, some as old as 5 years, running daily, and working just fine.

Mrs H

"The problem is not the drive, it seems, but the connections housed in the casing. LaCie had GLUED together vs. soldering, various parts in some instances, to the casing. "

Although my three LaCie D2 external drives (bought about 3 years ago) have given no trouble in Lion, your post recalled to me the two previous LaCie D2s, each holding my system backups, failed within a few days of eachother. The reason was that the internal circuitry of the power supply in each failed. I did not inspect them so cannot say whether they were "glued together". At that time (say 5 years ago) LaCie did not have a good reliability record but (so some people said) it improved.

I won't buy a LaCie drive until I am certain that they are reliable. You would think that an HD maker would work pretty hard to maintain reliability.

the solution was fairly easy. used the Disk Utility to erase and reformat the HD. its working great so far.

OceansDaughter wrote:

Movies of my father's 90th birthday, along with other irreplaceable photos, were on the now lost drives as Time Machine was on it as well.

If I'm reading this right, you might like to reconsider keeping both the only copy of the data and the backup of that data on the same drive.... no, I must be mis-reading that!

You are so right, Tone -- that's exactly what I did. STOOPID. No other word for it. That'll learn me. 😊

FA Porsche -- both of them. Different configurations of power plugs on each. The "very issue" you refer to is not a fix. Believe me. I never used the drive software -- I wipe the drives clean as you do.

The issue is -- as I've stated over and over again (and for the last time so re-read my posts) -- that LaCie drives (and don't ask me why or which ones -- I don't know) are not compatible with Lion at this time. Take the drive (in my case, a Seagate Barracuda, put it in a new housing/case, and it works fine.

So go figure. You pays yur money yu take yur chances.

This is it for me as far as this thread goes....

The issue is -- as I've stated over and over again (and for the last time so re-read my posts) -- that LaCie drives (and don't ask me why or which ones -- I don't know) are not compatible with Lion at this time.

I have two LaCie Quadra d2's. They both work flawlessly with Lion; they each have several bootable clones and partitions. If you have a drive which is not compatible, please be specific and post the model - your blanket statement is not helpful because it isn't based on facts.

as I've stated over and over again (and for the last time so re-read my posts) -- that LaCie drives (and don't ask me why or which ones -- I don't know) are not compatible with Lion at this time.

Repeating yourself does not make this true.

I have a LaCie Big2 Network2 4TB NAS drive as well as a 1TB Quadra and both are working perfectly with Lion. Perhaps you aren't aware that inside many LaCie cases there are actually Seagate Barracuda drives so if you have an issue it's with some aspect of software/firmware NOT the hardware.

FWIW I also have a 3TB Western Digital (NAS) plus 2TB and 1TB Seagates all on the same network and everything works fine with Lion, Snow Leopard, Windows XP, Windows 7 and Ubuntu ...

Strange, SteveKir. After the second one failed, I had to believe it wasn't a coincidence. LaCie told me to try the bum drive on another computer (of course I knew that wasn't the solution), but I gave it the ol' college try. Nothing. Then they told me to try another power cord. The power cord prongs were different so I couldn't try one on the other. (I knew that wasn't the problem, either). Changing the housing was the only solution.

As with you, my LaCie's did very well for the first five years or so , and then the Lion download. The thing is, it's not a problem with just the older drives, it's the same with new ones in relation to Lion. But on the other side of the coin, others aren't having issues. A firmware issue? Bad wiring?

Compatibility should have been tested well before the release of Lion, but as the Apple rep told me (with an attitude) over the phone, "It's only been a month!" Oh . . . okay.

Wait until Apple announces a fix for the incompatibility, SteveKir -- I don't think it will come from the LaCie camp, to be honest. After that, you should be fine. My new Seagate drive looks like a black blob -- I think we all like the aesthetics of LaCie and now we kinda kick ourselves for judging a book by it's cover when stuff like this happens.

It will be interesting if the Seagate conks out, too. Well, interesting in a geek sort of way. Anyway, I'm backing up furiously as I write.

Cheers to all -- best wishes to LaCie and Apple as they figure out what's going on. I'm bowing out of this thread and hope my experience helped vs. hurt anyone. Thanks for listening and offering advice as I worked through the issue.

Oh good grief -- I AM aware that a Barracuda is inside my particular LaCie drive because I've had the thing pulled apart for more than a week. I just put the Barracuda (and saying it again DOES make it true in this instance) into new housing. The LaCie bits were bad. Your set up sounds superb -- thanks for sharing.

I'm on Lion, with similar issues with two WD external HD. But what I found fixed the problem was to:

1. go to the manufacturer's website (in this case Western Digital),

2. locate my external HD, download the download.

For instance, I downloaded the WD Drive Utilities for Mac (for My Passport for Mac USB 3.0):

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=219&sid=157&lang=en

Install the downloaded app.

3. Plug in external (this part, I think is important) directly into your tower or laptop (as opposed to through a USB multi-plug extender). Possibly this is because you access more power?

[I'm trying to remember in which order everything happened. But I think at this point the external hard drive mounted]

4. Install the software that is found on the external HD (in my case, it was a brand new device, so that had never been installed).

5. Run "WD Drive Utilities" and run diagnostics.

6. Test to see if it holds. Unmount the External HD. Unplug. Replug in and see if it mounts.

Note: I have not yet tested to see if plugging in the external somewhere other than directly into the tower also works. But I think the main problem is getting it to mount the first time and installing the software. That's what I think.

You do not need WD's software; using Disk Utility is a much better option to format a drive.