[Therealmakaveli]

I just bought a LaCie d2 160 GB external hard drive the other day. All was going well and I had transferred a lot of my music and image files over to the external disk so as to relieve the 40GB hard drive my iMac G4 Flat Panel has from being so bogged down.

Then when I was moving things around, the plug for the LaCie drive came out of socket so it wasn't properly unmounted before shut-off. Since then, my iMac doesn't recognize the drive on start-up and when I click on "initialize" the LaCie drive in Disk Utility, the First Aid says:

Invalid Volume Header
The volume needs to be repaired.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit

1 HFS volume checked
Volume needs repair

Clearly, there's a problem. What can I do to repair the drive properly without losing the data? There's a "Restore" tab on there that looks like a good option, but, honestly, I'm clueless and really don't want to lose the 15+ GBs of music files I have. What are my options here?

[bradoesch]

First thing, don't initialize! That's equivalent to formatting in the Windows world.

If Disk Utility can't repair the disk then I'd recommend DiskWarrior. It's fixed many disks for me.

You may want to try plugging it in while the computer is running and give it another chance to mount it. I've had some strange things happen when disks weren't unmounted properly and sometimes they refuse to mount and later they're fine.

[peter_cph]

No doubt Disk Warrios is an awesome app. It has done wonders for me. However, other apps have helped me in similar situations, when Disk Warrior gave up ... Data Rescue (http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue_info.php) is quite impressive and has helped extract all (!) data from drives that were behaving badly. Techtool Pro (no introduction necessary) too.

However ... in your situation: I did the same thing ... and I couldn't get in contact with the drive. I plugged and unplugged the FireWire cable a million times (almost) .... only to find out, that if I connected to the drive via USB (it was in a combo box with both options), I had absoluytely no problems accessing the drive .... so, copy everyting to somewhere else and then initialize/reformat the faulty drive, and copy back ... that's my suggestion,

Peter

[Trocisp]

I dropped my 250gb Lacie external hard drive and now it's making funny noices. I was told by DiscSavers not to turn it on because it might be ripping into the drive causing unrepairable damage. Discsaver wants $2000 to retreive the data. The data's not that important.

I'm thinking about replacing the hard drive with an Maxtor 300gb, but use the same Lacie casing. Is this possible? Can anyone tell how to do this or point me in the right direction.

Thanks in advance.

[bradoesch]

If you can open the case you're set. I'm not sure which Lacie drive you have so I can't tell you how to open yours. Once inside remove the old drive and install the new one just as the old one was. Make sure the jumpers are set to Master on the new drive, or however they were set on the old one.

[Trocisp]

Originally Posted by bradoesch

If you can open the case you're set. I'm not sure which Lacie drive you have so I can't tell you how to open yours. Once inside remove the old drive and install the new one just as the old one was. Make sure the jumpers are set to Master on the new drive, or however they were set on the old one.

I opened the case it looks pretty simple. I'm going to buy a replacement hard drive today. Hopefully it works.

[[email protected]]

Originally Posted by JayRedd

the First Aid says:

Invalid Volume Header
The volume needs to be repaired.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit

1 HFS volume checked
Volume needs repair

Clearly, there's a problem. What can I do to repair the drive properly without losing the data? There's a "Restore" tab on there that looks like a good option, but, honestly, I'm clueless and really don't want to lose the 15+ GBs of music files I have. What are my options here?

High JayRedd,
You might save your money before buying DiskWarrior.
If your diskutility does not help, try to fix the problem from command line.
It helped and saved me a lot of bucks.
Read the Tips&Tricks in the Mac Folder at
before buying DiskWarrior you might try this
Read the manual before using fsck_hfs !

Enjoy every day of life
Gerald