LaCie drive won’t mount

[Christopher Hill]

We have 4 LaCie drives which have this sort of problem intermittently. It’s very frustrating and because of it we won’t be buying any more LaCie drives. The problem we’ve found has been most often relegated to the Power Supplies. If you notice, they probably hiss when plugged in. With ours, the hissing has gotten worse over the months until the drives no longer show up in finder. They spin up and sound like the heads are accessing content, but it never shows up.

Basically the only solutions we’ve found are to either replace the Power Supply (works in most cases) or show a little TLC. Our best TLC solution has been to turn on the drive an allow it to get to it’s “stopping point” where it’s not making any more progress. Then quickly turn the drive off and on again while it’s still spinning. Sometimes it takes multiple tries to get this to work, but it eventually does.

We’re in the process of moving all our assets off of those LaCie drives to a NAS Archive and then we’ll likely dismantle the LaCie’s and use the bare drives as hot-swaps in our Server storage. I really don’t think it’s the drive, but likely the controllers or the Power Supply in all those cases.

Regardless, best of luck retrieving your data.

P.S. I’m assuming you’ve already tried disc recovery software? Software will likely recover your assets as long as the drives themselves are not physically damaged. I don’t have any personal recommendations, but perhaps others do. The fact that you can see it in the System Profiler leads me to believe it should be recoverable somehow on your own without dropping a ton of money on a professional clean-room service.

[Michael Gissing]

[Lin Brummett] “I have tried different cables, different ports, different power supplies, different computers”

The best way to fry a drive is to use different power supplies. The manufacturers supplied power supply is the one to use. I get annoyed when people send me two drives that are different capacity and the power supplies are bundled together so I can’t tell which one belongs to the drive.

When you get your repaired drive back, label it and the power supply and threaten death to anyone who uses the wrong one.

[Lin Brummett]

This is my first experience with this type of drive failure so in answer to Christopher: I haven’t tried any of the disk recovery software since the Mac only sees it as an unknown device. While I know it would benefit me sometime down the road I’m not sure I want to invest in something that I wouldn’t directly benefit from this time around. A friend just recommended Disk Warrior so I now have an inquiry into that manufactuer to see if it might possibly work.

We have three different types of drives in house, GRaid, Big Disk Extreme+ and Big Disk Quadra. Each variety uses a different power supply with the two LaCies having different ends, the GRaid uses the same 4 pin connector as the problem drive but the supply is physically different. All of our Big Disk Extreme+ drives are about the same vintage so I have been using LaCie branded power supplies with the 4 pin connector though I admit to not checking specific voltages. I just made a quick run through the pile and all appear to have the same specs. so I hope things have been kosher there.

Lin Brummett

[Petteri Evilampi]

The following might sound quite extreme for most and I am suggesting this only if nothing else works.
First, is there more than one physical drive in that problematic LaCie case? If not, then open it, take the drive out, stick it in to Your Mac tower as b-, c- or d-drive (not a, thats a mac system drive!) and power up Your Mac. If drive is ok, it should mount normally to Your Desktop.

[Rafael Amador]

Open the Disk Utility and see if the disk shows up.
If is grayed try to clicking the “Mounting Point” that you see in this pic::

If it mounts, back up all the stuff in another driver and reformat the LaCie.
If it doesn’t works you may try DataRescueII or FileSalvage. Really easy to use.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Lin Brummett]

Thanks guys for all the input. I have been away on other projects but am now back. The drive won’t show up at all in Disk Utility so I can’t move forward there. I think my next step will be to try a data rescue program and if that doesn’t work, toss a coin between voiding a couple warranties and pulling the drives out of the case and mounting it in another case or spending the big bucks with a data recovery service.

Lin

[Wayne Dupuis]

Shut down your mac. Shut down the Lacie drive, and turn it’s power button off. Unplug the power cord from your Mac. You will hear a click, after which you can plug the cable back in to the back of your Mac. Power up the Lacie. Power up your Mac. You should see the Lacie. Do not eject the Lacie before shutting down your Mac, but rather Shut down then turn off the drive. This should solve the issue.

Wayne Dupuis
MultiMedia Tech
VIHA

[Lin Brummett]

Swing and a miss. I actually tried it several times with no LaCie love.
I just talked to another friend and I think since the drives are still spinning we are going to swap the drives into another LaCie case and see if that works. He claims he had a similar problem and doing the swap allowed him to salvage the media. This is probably what the clean room guys do for quadruple the cost of a replacement drive. I will just be sure to vacuum up all my scattered sunflower seed shells before proceeding.

[Deborah Fryer]

I have all my media on a LaCie 4-big 6T drive. It has been working fine for the past 9 months – and several projects. Yesterday, it wouldn’t mount. I have tried plugging it into different outlets, and it still won’t mount. I have tried plugging it into my laptop, and it still won’t mount. All the media is on a Raid 5, so there is redundant backup for a Hardware failure. I’m told by LaCie that what I’m seeing is a Software failure/corruption.

I ran Data Rescue – no luck. I’m running a beta version now of the next version of Data Rescue… holding my breath for the next 36 hours to see if that might work.

I have been told that the directory is corrupt, so that names of the source files are not recoverable. I might be able to recover the clips themselves, but the recovery software renames them 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. That’s not very helpful when final cut asks me to reconnect the media and all the source clip names are gone…

Any suggestions on how to get my media back? Any other data recovery apps to try?

I have a time machine running 24/7 backing up my tower, which is where the project file is. I had the 6T raid set up to store the media in 3 of the sectors and create a redundant backup in the 4th sector, so I thought I had my bases covered. What to do now?

Thanks in advance for your help and advice!

Deborah

[Deborah Fryer]

Did that work? I am in the same boat as you were and wonder what the fix was. I tried Data Rescue. No dice. I’m running the Beta version now to see if that helps… I’ve seen recommendations for Disk Warrior, Data Rescuell and File Salvage, but haven’t tried any of them yet.., Please let me know if you found a workaround.

I kept the project files on my tower and just the media on the LaCie, so I guess worst case scenario is I could rebuild the project from scratch, and reingest all the media, but that doesn’t help me recreate all the stills, archival footage, and music that were on the drive as part of the various projects…

Thanks for your advice!
Deborah