Lacie external HD won't mount

[Danster]

Hi

I'm having problems with my external Lacie HD as it will not appear when I switch it on.

It was working perfectly until I unplugged my iMac to give it a dust down and clean my desk, when I hooked everything back up and turned my external it just won't appear.

Having switched the cables around, logging onto another account I inserted the installation disks to see if it would show up there but..it doesn't.

The problems I can think of is either faulty firewire connection cable, which seems to be fine, not bends/cuts or the actual HD itself. Though when i switch it on I can hear it whirling noises, same as usual.

Any help appreciated thanks.

 

[searay345]

Hello Danster

Do you have another mac with firewire you could try it on? Do you have a USB cable you can try to see if that works?

Let us know what happens

Cheerio
Searay

 

[Walrus666]

Hi

I'm having problems with my external Lacie HD as it will not appear when I switch it on.

It was working perfectly until I unplugged my iMac to give it a dust down and clean my desk, when I hooked everything back up and turned my external it just won't appear.

Having switched the cables around, logging onto another account I inserted the installation disks to see if it would show up there but..it doesn't.

The problems I can think of is either faulty firewire connection cable, which seems to be fine, not bends/cuts or the actual HD itself. Though when i switch it on I can hear it whirling noises, same as usual.

Any help appreciated thanks.

Hello, have you tried Disk Utility to mount the external drive?

 

[Danster]

Sadly I don't have another firewire cable to test if that is the problem. I have tried using disk utility, apple system profiler and other scanning devices but none of them pick my hd up

 

[Walrus666]

Sadly I don't have another firewire cable to test if that is the problem. I have tried using disk utility, apple system profiler and other scanning devices but none of them pick my hd up

Have you tried unplugging the external drive and plugging it back in to the power source?

 

[Danster]

Have you tried unplugging the external drive and plugging it back in to the power source?

I'm not sure what you mean. I've inspected the HD all over, reconnected it many times, blew into the holes for dust, pushed the cables into the sockets hard and nothing seems to make it mount

I have just bought a new firewire to firewire cable off ebay, quite cheaply and if that doesn't work it's probably my HD which is at fault in some way.

I'd like to know if it's the actual firewire sockets themselves as they seem to be rather loose with my current cables wiggling around quite a lot.

Thought as I've said everytime I switch it on it makes the same whirling sounds as usual so I know it's not dead and I have really important files on it, is there anyway to repair external hard drives?

 

[Walrus666]

I'm not sure what you mean. I've inspected the HD all over, reconnected it many times, blew into the holes for dust, pushed the cables into the sockets hard and nothing seems to make it mount

I have just bought a new firewire to firewire cable off ebay, quite cheaply and if that doesn't work it's probably my HD which is at fault in some way.

I'd like to know if it's the actual firewire sockets themselves as they seem to be rather loose with my current cables wiggling around quite a lot.

Thought as I've said everytime I switch it on it makes the same whirling sounds as usual so I know it's not dead and I have really important files on it, is there anyway to repair external hard drives?

Hello, What I meant was, unplug the external hard drive's power cord from the socket, wait a few seconds and plug it back in. Sometimes I have to do this to my external drive.
As far as repairing an external hard drive is concerned, check out Disk Warrior and Tech Tool Pro.

 

[Danster]

Hi

I received a new firewire cable today and tried to mount my external using that but still no luck

I also have Diskwarrior from a problem I had a while back but it -scans for devices- with it turned on and only locates my internal..

http://www.fixya.com/support/t421134-lacie_hard_drive_nonfunctional

The comments at the top of the page is almost exactly the same problem I have but there is no solution to be found.

if it does not mount or does not appear in DISK UTILTY, then it is a high probability that the enclosure/bridge board has failed and the drive ( if not making grinding, buzzing, clicking or beeping sounds) will have to be extracted and placed into a more stable enclosure.

My drive is making the same noises as before, a grinding sound following by whirls.

 

[LinzA19]

I'm having the same problem only I work at a Public Access TV station where members come in and edit on various different external hard drives. What's happening to us is that we have 3 iMac computers, all brand new "silver" with MAC OS 10.5.2, 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, and 2 GB of internal memory. These computers worked yesterday, read all of our hard drives, and today 2 of them will not read any hard drives. I have replaced all of the cables going to the computer and still nothing.

After reading the forums here and on other sites, I checked the Disk Utility and the drives are not showing up there either. It can't be the hard drives (Which are all LaCies) because it's happening to all of them. It's not the cables and in one of the computers, we had this problem before but it wouldn't fail at the Mac store so they replaced the logic board.

I'm out of ideas and don't know what else to do. Also, the problem isn't consistant. Sometimes it's fine and the HD's mount with no problem, but other times none of the hds will mount. We are at wits end and it's beginning to effect our membership. Any ideas?

Thanks everyone!

 

[Walrus666]

I'm having the same problem only I work at a Public Access TV station where members come in and edit on various different external hard drives. What's happening to us is that we have 3 iMac computers, all brand new "silver" with MAC OS 10.5.2, 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, and 2 GB of internal memory. These computers worked yesterday, read all of our hard drives, and today 2 of them will not read any hard drives. I have replaced all of the cables going to the computer and still nothing.

After reading the forums here and on other sites, I checked the Disk Utility and the drives are not showing up there either. It can't be the hard drives (Which are all LaCies) because it's happening to all of them. It's not the cables and in one of the computers, we had this problem before but it wouldn't fail at the Mac store so they replaced the logic board.

I'm out of ideas and don't know what else to do. Also, the problem isn't consistant. Sometimes it's fine and the HD's mount with no problem, but other times none of the hds will mount. We are at wits end and it's beginning to effect our membership. Any ideas?

Thanks everyone!

I'm wondering if it's the ports on the iMac that's causing the problems. I just got done exchanging my iMac 2.4GHz for an iMac 2.66 GHz because of a faulty ethernet port. So far so good on the new one.

 

[LinzA19]

That's an idea. We actually have already replaced the logic board on one of the computers because the experts at the Mac Store thought that could be the issue...Unfortunatley not. Is there an easy way to check the ports or should I just bring it back to mac?

 

[Danster]

Well I've plugged the firewire cable into both sockets and it doesn't show up and my iPod connects just fine using the firewire dock. Though It doesn't appear unless I removed the Lacie firewire cable.

 

[Ric]

Hi there Danster,

if you are 'really' stuck, then you can send me the drive and I'll recover the data from it...if possible.

regards

Ric

 

[LinzA19]

We discovered a fix to our problem. Turns out that the Firewire 800 ports (Or 9 pin Firewire as we call them) are faulty. We switched out all of the 9 pin cables for usb cables and now we are up and working fine on all of our computers. Being that the professionals at the Mac store told us to use the 9 pin connectors to run our HD's I think that it's interesting that they are the problem.

Anyway, thanks everyone for the help.

 

[Walrus666]

We discovered a fix to our problem. Turns out that the Firewire 800 ports (Or 9 pin Firewire as we call them) are faulty. We switched out all of the 9 pin cables for usb cables and now we are up and working fine on all of our computers. Being that the professionals at the Mac store told us to use the 9 pin connectors to run our HD's I think that it's interesting that they are the problem.

Anyway, thanks everyone for the help.

I would have bet that I mentioned the ports in my previous post. Anyway, you shouldn't consider this as a "fix". When I found out that my ethernet port wasn't functioning properly, Apple Care, of course, offered to fix it free of charge. I explained to Apple Care that I just got done spending a considerable amount of money, didn't want to wait a week or two for repairs, didn't want a defective machine and that I would prefer exchanging it for the newest model that just came out. Even though the exchange policy expired by one week, they still let me make the exchange! So, because of a bit of squawking, I received the newest iMac with two gigs of RAM as opposed to one gig and a faster processor!
So, even though this "fix" seems to be working for you, the fact is that your Macs are defective. In addition, using USB as opposed to using Firewire would be like riding in a horse and buggy instead of an airplane.
By the way, I hear mixed views and I'm a bit curious. Are you able to boot up from your external drives connected via USB ports on your iMac? If not, that's certainly another thing to consider.

 

[LinzA19]

You did in fact say ports. I so wish that I was the one who usually took care of the equipment becuase I would so bring the iMacs in and skwak a lot to get the exchange that we need. I'll talk to my tech guy about the switch, I thinhk that it's a brillient idea, especially since the computers are only 5 months old.

I could boot my computer with the hard drives connected via the usb. I know that the usb isn't ideal but it was unfortunately the onlyoption we have for now. I'll keep you posted on the boot.

Thanks so much for all of your help!