LaCie drive won’t mount

[Lin Brummett]

It did not work. I was hoping it was a damaged controller but I had the same problem in the new case. I ended up just sending the drive into LaCie for a warranty replacement but no salvage.

FYI, prior to pulling drives out of their cases and doing the swap I got the blessing from LaCie support to do so and maintain my warranties on the drives. They did stipulate that the case I swapped into was the identical model and I had to provide serial numbers to verify.

While I had the drives out of their cases I connected each drive individually to an external case just to see if the computer would recognize each drive. It saw one but not the other. At that point I threw in the towel, buttoned everything back up and sent the bad unit in. I didn’t expect to recover anything from either drive since they are stripped together but I wanted to exhaust all hope of an affordable recovery before admitting defeat.

Fortunately I did have all my media backed up so all I had to do was spend a day finding all my still images, graphic elements, etc. that were were in various file cabinets around the office. These weren’t backed up because i was accumulating them as I worked on the project with the plan of backing the rest up at the end. I was able to retrieve my timeline from the autosave vault on a different drive.

I wish I had good news for you but not in this case. Sorry.

[Jason Brown]

I came across this post as I’m searching…because I have a 6TB LaCie 4big Quadra that won’t mount the volume on it as well.

I have it setup in RAID5…so I could lose 1 drive and still retain the data. This isn’t my primary media drive…it was my time machine backup, but I did have some files that I put on it that I don’t have anywhere else.

I open Disk Utility on my mac, and I can see the drive connected…and even the volume I can see (but it is greyed out) and when I try to mount, it gives me an error message. I’ve tried hooking it up USB and eSATA, both give me the same experience.

Any ideas? Am I hosed?

-Jason

[Dave Johnson]

I haven’t read the entire thread so I apologize if this has already been covered, but I’ve had lots of issues with Lacie external drives and found that the issue was more often than not related to the power supply … have you tried switching out the power cable/pack with the one from one of your other Lacie drives or buying another from Lacie?

By the way, that issue was so frequent with Lacie drives for me that I won’t buy them anymore and now only use external drives that use a standard power supply/cable like these:
https://maxxdigital.com/shop/index.php?cPath=152&osCsid=0abbb662e5887f4641838472a50f3c69

[Rafael Amador]

Hi Jason,
No idea, but I would try to run DataRescue or FileSalvage (free demos) to see if is able to retrieve the files.
Those applications (normally) can read the HD even if its doesn’t mounts.
Rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Christopher Hill]

I commented earlier in this thread some months ago and as a follow up we ended up asking LaCie for 6 new power supplies which they sent us free of charge. They simply asked for the serial numbers on the drives. I doubt that any were still under warranty. We just told them that the drives were not mounting and it was a result of the Power Supply. Ours were hissing btw, which was a tell-tale sign of failure.

Since we’ve had the new power supplies we haven’t had any problems with the drives spinning up or mounting. My bet would be that you’re in the same situation considering you can see them in disk utility but can’t mount them. Either try a new(er) PSU from another LaCie to test or just ask LaCie for a new PSU.

[Deborah Fryer]

Hi Jason,
Sorry to hear that. I went through every data rescue trick I could think of – Tech Tool Pro, Disk Warrior, using different cables, I even (with LaCie’s permission) tried swapping out the drives one at a time to see if I could tell which drive was the bad one. I tried opening the drive from the terminal window. I had no luck with any of it.

I had my time machine backed up on a separate drive, and my project files and autosave files on my tower, so I just lost a ton of media (which took about 2 weeks to re-ingest), but not the project files themselves.

LaCie swore up and down that the issue had nothing to do with their drive or their power supply, i.e., that what I was experiencing was not a hardware failure, but was the result of some software corruption that had made the directory inaccessible. They couldn’t explain how the software corruption might have happened other than the usual – I must have turned off the drive before unmounting it, I must have knocked the power supply, there was a surge in my line, etc. (none of which happened).

In the end, I was able to retrieve nothing. LaCie offered to sell me a replacement 6T big drive for about $800 (they gave me some loyalty discount), and they also ended up replacing the old drive with a new one for free, so they are trying to make good on their drives failing for no apparent reason.

I googled around everywhere looking for help when this happened to me, and someone somewhere posted that sticking the drive in the freezer in a plastic bag had freed up whatever was stuck. I didn’t try this myself, so can’t verify if it would help or not. I bet if you googled freezer hard drive failure, you’ll find the post.

Good luck!

Best,
Deborah
https://www.lilafilms.com

[Jason Brown]

I don’t have any comparable power supplies to test, but I thought that might be the issue…based on all the posts I was reading.

Since this initial post, I’ve had some luck.

I really have no explanation, because I ran disk warrior…and I wasn’t able to run any diagnostics on the drive in DW – it said there was a hardware failure.

I pulled out, and put back in one of the drives in the unit, and re-plugged the USB cable. DW was then able to do a directory rebuild. It found many errors…I saved the log. And I now have a properly mounted and working drive.

I’m over LaCie…their support sucks, and apparently so do their drives. What should be my next purchase? I’ve looked at MaxxDigital…also CalDigit…are there better RAID5 solutions? what is BEST in reliability?

-Jason

[Deborah Fryer]

Glad DW worked for you. I agree, LaCie support is REALLY BAD. I’d like to know what other recommend, too, because these drives are NOT RELIABLE.

[Lin Brummett]

We have had mixed luck with LaCie support but the reliability and performance of the drives seem to keep declining. We started with GRaid, started using LaCie because of cost but after a number of failures are now solidly back in the GRaid camp. I get the feeling that the LaCie model is quantity over quality, sell ’em cheap and replace the whole thing if it breaks, it’s the user’s problem if they didn’t have the foresight to back up their stuff minutes before the failure occurred.

We have 40 plus GRaids and with the exception of some fan problems on the first few we purchased they have been problem free.

BTW, I was the one who relayed to Deborah the drive in the freezer trick and it did once work for us, but that was in a time and place long ago and not with a LaCie drive.

Glad you got your problem resolved.

Lin Brummett

[Jason Brown]

I don’t see that any of the G-Tech drives have LAN support? Is that common? Is SAS a better connection to share in a workgroup?

I have about 3 machines I’d love to have all be able to access the same media.

-Jason