[mintcake]

I'm having a strange problem and I wonder if someone with more experience than me can work out the cause?

I have a LaCie Ethernet Disk Mini which I connect by RJ45 cable to my Airport Extreme base station. It also has a USB2 port so I can use it as a USB2 drive when I need to shift large volumes of data in a hurry. I've set up a share on this volume called 'Media' which I use to serve my iTunes, photo and movie libraries over Airport to my G4 Mini upstairs and to my Macbook Pro.

Since yesterday, although the share mounts as per normal using AFP, nothing appears in the Finder - no files, no folders, nothing. Thing is, I can still access all the data via http or via USB2, so it's still there. Just the files and folders don't appear in the Finder when connected via AFP. This goes both for my MPB and for my G4 Mini. Both have been upgraded to 10.4.6.

LaCie support are not being very helpful, they just tell me it's a hardware problem and I should send the disk back to them (and I pay for postage of course). This doesn't seem like a hardware problem to me, it looks like a software problem. I can't remember whether I had successfully accessed the share since installing 10.4.6, I wonder if that's the problem...

[ghporter]

It does look like a hardware problem. Specifically, the ethernet interface seems to be hosed. If it were something to do with the drive or its interface, the USB connection wouldn't work. If it were just about anything else, nothing would work. Right now, it looks like the part of the ethernet interface that provides data from the drive has failed.

Is it still under warranty? It clearly doesn't work, so I'd pull the drive (or back it up via USB if it came with a drive) and send it to LaCie to have them replace it.

[mintcake]

That's not what I wanted to hear.

But thanks. Guess I'll have to bite the bullet and send it back.