Help mounting LaCie external drive

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Darryl Claps Author

Level 1

79 points

Help mounting LaCie external drive

I use a fairly new LaCie for Time Machine backup and it no longer mounts.

It's firewire, so I have already purchased a new firewire cable to make sure that wasn't the culprit.

I can tell the drive is spinning up when I plug it in to my Mac Mini.

I found some older discussions here that mentioned some command lines, but none have worked.

And the drive does not show up in Disk Utility.

If I had another (firewire enabled) Mac to try it on, I would, but I don't.

Mac mini, macOS Sierra (10.12)

Posted on Apr 3, 2018 2:41 PM

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Answer 1

K Shaffer

Level 7

34,978 points

Apr 5, 2018 12:40 PM in response to Darryl Claps

There are several fairly good 'examples' of external storage drives

among those, few w/ professional specification & power adapters.

OWC External Hard Drives and Storage Solutions for Macs

One I've considered several years is the Mercury Elite Pro with

most ports I'd need across various vintage Mac hardware and

an ability to run clone system copies (to troubleshoot Mac.)

While I was given a few owc drives, and newer LaCie, etc they

had issues (maybe as simple as bad rotational HDD) so I never

could use them. Thought I did get some guaranteed RAM there.

In any event...

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Answer 2

DonH49

Level 6

16,704 points

Apr 14, 2018 8:36 AM in response to Darryl Claps

Try these:

1- shutdown Mac and give it an SMC reset and zap pram. Disconnect all external devices beforehand. That firewire drive, remove the power cable and the firewire cable. Let it sit for a short while then try it all.

2- if that does not work then find another Mac which can do firewire and connect that Lacie to it.

NEVER unplug a firewire anything less you unmount it from the Desktop first. Then power off that device then disconnect the firewire cable. Stay to this rule and you'll not have anymore problems.

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Answer 3

K Shaffer

Level 7

34,978 points

Apr 4, 2018 2:14 PM in response to Darryl Claps

If the LaCie drive enclosure had been incorrectly un-mounted, that may be cause

for the unit to not appear or mount as expected later. Not sure how I used to do it

but there had been a way to try & see if those units could be accessed again.

However there also had been hardware issues with some of LaCie external drives.

So far one I bought about 12 years ago for use with bootable FW clones still works.

It still has four complete system clones on board that work ~ for older PPC G4 Mac.

{But not used as often, because most newer daily use Macs don't need FW to boot.}

Mount & Unmount Drives from the Command Line in Mac OS X

Mount & Unmount Drives from the Command Line in Mac OS X ... and remount drives

from the command line? ... My WD external hard drive wasn't showing up in ...

osxdaily.com/2013/05/13/mount-unmount-drives-from-the-...

You may be in the market for another external hard drive enclosure.

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Answer 4

Darryl Claps Author

Level 1

79 points

Apr 4, 2018 2:49 PM in response to K Shaffer

Thanks for taking the time, K-

I don't have much experience with command lines and I am not sure how to tell for sure what the drive's name is (I only use it for quarterly time machine backups), but I'll look into trying this.

As far as just deciding the drive is bad - how many of these have I gone through? This one is only a few years old.

I read articles rating "best external drives of 2018" and then go to amazon and they all have reviews with bad experiences akin to "failed after 1 week!".

Like most things in life, it's a crapshoot.

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Answer 5

Darryl Claps Author

Level 1

79 points

Apr 14, 2018 8:39 AM in response to DonH49

I followed your instructions, so thank you.

Oddly, under apple info, systems report says the firewire-to-thunderbolt adapter is active and "has a device connected", even though the drive does not mount still.

I also tried to mount the LaCie on another mac, which also failed to produce results.

What's the standard, then? Purchase several externals for time machine backup expecting some (or all) will fail after a couple of years?

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Help mounting LaCie external drive

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