[Chris O'Brien]

I have a 120gig LaCie FireWire HDD that is completely dead. It happened about 4 months ago (I've been trying everything to get it back) using OSX 10.1 for no apparent reason... I've subsequently upgraded to panther and it can't see it either.

Any idea's what to do? DiskUtility can see the physical drive but no volumes, but wont even erase the drive (although, I'd rather keep the data I have on it, but this seems to be my only chance) - it returns an error code of 5344...

And for some reason, disk utility thinks its 2 terrabytes - I wish.....

Thanks in advance for any help

[Macola]

Can DiskWarrior see the drive? If it can, most likely it will fix it.

[Chris O'Brien]

Unfortunately not...

looking in /dev/ i can see the physical disk as disk2 but there's no volumes on it like disk2s0 or something... Using things like hdiutil to try and format it or whatever hasn't worked so far - but I'm not too well acquainted with hdiutil...

[tooki]

Open the drive and remove the IDE hard drive inside. Then install the drive inside a G3 or G4 (on the motherboard IDE).

This might allow DiskWarrior and/or Disk Utility to see in more detail what's going on than through the FireWire interface.

tooki

[Nebrie]

Originally posted by Black Book:
Unfortunately not...

looking in /dev/ i can see the physical disk as disk2 but there's no volumes on it like disk2s0 or something... Using things like hdiutil to try and format it or whatever hasn't worked so far - but I'm not too well acquainted with hdiutil...

I had this exact same situation with my Lacie 120gb drive. Get the DataRescue demo, see if that will get your files. If it does, buy it and rescue your files. It was the only thing that worked for me.

[guigo]

I have this same drive and, last year, I have a problem but not with the HD.

One day, simply like that, the FW turns off and don't wanna start...

The problem was in the power dispositive, inside the case...fortunately, it was not a serious thing.

But, after reading this post, I'm a little bit afraid.....I just bought a mobile FW porsche design 80GB, Lacie too, just in case....like everyone, the stuff I have inside my HD FW is very important.

Anyone knows if the 120GB Lacie D2 have some kind of current defect or is just an isolated case?

Best regards

Guigo

[Chris O'Brien]

Originally posted by tooki:
Open the drive and remove the IDE hard drive inside. Then install the drive inside a G3 or G4 (on the motherboard IDE).

This might allow DiskWarrior and/or Disk Utility to see in more detail what's going on than through the FireWire interface.

tooki

wont that void the warranty on the drive though? Not sure if I want to do that...

[Chris O'Brien]

Just tried DataRescue X, but it only looks for volumes, but the problem with the disk is that there's no volumes that OSX can see... So, unfortunately it was no use.

Can I just make a file in /dev/ called disk2s0 or something then use hdiutil to make it the right sort of size etc that I want, or am I being stupid?

[Nebrie]

Originally posted by Black Book:
Just tried DataRescue X, but it only looks for volumes, but the problem with the disk is that there's no volumes that OSX can see... So, unfortunately it was no use.

Can I just make a file in /dev/ called disk2s0 or something then use hdiutil to make it the right sort of size etc that I want, or am I being stupid?

Oops, I left out a step. I couldn't see the volume either in any place other than Disk Utility, so I had Disk Utility redo the drive (without erasing the actual data). This resulted in a new blank volume on my desktop. I then left DataRescue on overnight to find all the bits.

[Chris O'Brien]

Unfortunately, Disk Utility can't see any volumes on the drive either...

[Nebrie]

Does disk utility see anything related to the drive? Like 118 GB LaCie Group SA or something? That can still be erased even if the volume within is missing.

[Chris O'Brien]

It see's 2.0 TB LaCie Group SA as an external firewire disk.

However, it's obviously not 2.0 TB, it's 120gigs - well, harddrive gigs, not proper ones...

So I can click on the disk and choose to erase it. It then comes up asking if I'm sure then waits for about 5 seconds and comes up saying

Disk Erase failed

Disk Erase failed with the error:

Unknown error: -5344

So it's a wee bit annoying....

[Chris O'Brien]

I'm trying to remember the circumstances which lead to this all happening.

I was still using OSX 10.1 at the time and it had just crashed (the white on black writing printing down the top left of the screen). This didn't happen often, so when I rebooted I ran the cron jobs - the crashes would only occur if I was a bit lax on doing these (well, the majority of the time, anyway). Note, that OSX could still actually see the one and only volume I had on the disk at this point, and it was mounted on the desktop.

However, after I then rebooted the system the next day, that's when all the problems started....

Dunno if any of the above helps in anyway, but that's how this all came to pass, as far as I remember.

Oh - and trying to partition the disk in disk utility (current in 'Volume Scheme' shows no partitions) to have one partition will always try to do it as 2.0 TB even if I specify stuff like 0.05 TB to try and get even something out of it... I'm resigned to losing my data now

Thanks again

[Nebrie]

sorry, but I'm out of ideas. You may have to email lacie if the warranty is still good. Short of contacting Disk $avers, the data is gone.

[wg2499]

I had something similar happen when I had a drive connected to another firewire drive before the computer .. is the drive connected directly to the computer? when I did that it worked fine... hope it helps..

[Chris O'Brien]

It's plugged straight into the back of my mac. I've just, out of interest, plugged it into my external cd burner and it fails to show up at all now.

I think one of the main problems is that it's not even spinning up. It tries to and makes a click after each attempt. Sounds a bit like a metronome. It does this 4 or 5 times and then spins down again.

[Nebrie]

It sounds like it's dead.

[Chris O'Brien]

Originally posted by Nebrie:
It sounds like it's dead.

helpful