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LaCie Drive Power Supply
I guess I did a bad thing today. I accidentally plugged my friend’s LaCie Big Disk Exteme into a power adapter from a different FW Drive. Now I can’t get the LaCie to start up at all. I guess the other power adapter must have put out a slightly different voltage and fried a capacitator or something in the LaCie.
Has anyone ever had this happen? It seems most drives use the same 4 pin plug for the power adapters and the way we swap drives around, I’m sort of surprised I didn’t make that mistake before. Right now, I’m trying to reassure my friend that we can get the drive fixed with and not lose her data.-John Dehn
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3 Replies
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[John Dehn] “Has anyone ever had this happen? It seems most drives use the same 4 pin plug for the power adapters and the way we swap drives around, I’m sort of surprised I didn’t make that mistake before. Right now, I’m trying to reassure my friend that we can get the drive fixed with and not lose her data.”
Identical thing happened about two weeks ago right here on this forum. You need to get a label maker, some white tape and a marker or anything you can find and label all of your cables. I purchased a small label maker from an office store for $30 and everything is labeled.
9V connectors are the exact same way as they all look the same, but some have positive in the middle and some have positive on the ring. I have about 4 of these at least in my shop and could easily fry one of my components if they weren’t labeled.
Call LaCie Tech Support in the morning and see if they can take the drive back and get the media off the drive. That unit as it is right now will most like not work at all until they can repair it.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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If they can’t guarantee to get the data back off it then you can (probably) do it yourself – it will obviously void any the warranty on the drive though so it’s worth checking first.
The LaCie disks are really just a standard IDE disk in a metal case with a bit of circuitry to connect to the firewire and power the disk. If anything’s fried it’s almost certainly this circuitry and the disks are fine.
So you can take a screwdriver and a deep breath, take the back off the drive (there’s a screw hidden under the ‘Warranty void if removed’ sticker), take the disk drive out and put it into your Mac. Then copy the information off it onto another FW disk, or buy another disk chassis and put it in there.
The only fly in the ointment is that the BigDisk Extremes have two disks in them, configured as a RAID (any LaCie disk that’s twice the length of the old ones is like this). I’ve never done it with one of those – in theory it should work ok but has anyone else had practical experience of it? I think that you should just be able to get hold of another two-disk IDE chassis (G-raid do them) and put the disks in there.
Make sure that you keep them the same way around (one is primary and one is secondary) when you do it though, or get a techie friend to do it for you (then you can blame them if it goes wrong -only joking! :-p)
Good luck!
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[bodgetastic] “If they can’t guarantee to get the data back off it then you can (probably) do it yourself – it will obviously void any the warranty on the drive though so it’s worth checking first.”
If it was a single drive, your idea should work. With these being a RAID’ed pair, I would say chances are slim to none of this working. Best to let LaCie take a look at the unit.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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