OT: LaCie Hard Drive Failure

jrazz wrote on 1/3/2008, 11:47 AM
I have a 500 gig LaCie external that started making loud clicks and keeps trying to start up. This is the same exact thing that happened to my old LaCie 80 gig hard drive before it bit the dust. If you keep tinkering with it it will eventually kick into gear and run but then it shows up as an unformatted drive. I opened the external case and found out that it is 2 250gig drives in the case.

I have tried two data retrieval software programs- one dos based and one windows based. The windows based one was useless and the Dos one, well, unless I was not patient enough I could not get it to respond (I let it set for 2 hours). All I could see was a blinking cursor after following the prompts. The hard drive light was flashing but it does that when it is trying to come on line too so I do not know if it was actually doing something or if it lost connection with the drive.

Any suggestions?

j razz

Comments

jrazz wrote on 1/3/2008, 11:52 AM
I guess I should explain what I want to do. Basically just repair the table so that it recognizes that their is information on the drive. Once that is done, then I can migrate that over to another drive. That would be great.

j razz
rmack350 wrote on 1/3/2008, 12:17 PM
How many of these drives do you have? We found that the power supplies for the smaller ones would plug into the bigger ones but wouldn't provide enough juice, and we got the clicking sound. Mixing the power supplies is something to look out for.

And we also had outright failures.

We have 10 or 12 various models and I'm not too impressed with their reliability. The dual drive factor might make things worse but I think these are just jbod arrays.
jrazz wrote on 1/3/2008, 12:27 PM
I have had 2. The old one died about a year and a half ago. The power supplies have never been switched. I did read about that yesterday when I was trying to do some research on it.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

j razz
rmack350 wrote on 1/3/2008, 12:41 PM
It seems I've seen lots of suggestions on this site for recovery programs. Spinright comes to mind but I can't vouch for it.

Rob
TomE wrote on 1/3/2008, 2:52 PM
I had a similar problem with a WD SATA drive. It showed up as unformatted also. I downloaded File Scavenger and tested it with their demo. It found tons of stuff so I went ahead and bought the full version (90 bucks or something) It worked great and I successfully recovered the stuff. ( A lot of veg files and captured AVIs etc...)

http://www.quetek.com/download.htm

It is nice to be able to try it first and see if it works before you fork out the money for it.

TomE
apit34356 wrote on 1/3/2008, 6:39 PM
jrazz, since there were two drives in the enclosure, possibly overheating one or both drives could be the problem. Try cooling down the drives in a air tight, moisture free bag in a deep freeze for a couple of hours. then quickly assembly the drives and test. A second possibly is the logic board used to blend the drives maybe defective.
jrazz wrote on 1/4/2008, 7:02 AM
Thanks for the suggestions. I will give both a try this weekend once I get some time to mess with it again as I am in the process of revamping my website.

j razz