LACIE drive not visible

When you switch on your computer press the F12 key that should take you to the boot screen , scroll down to the usb drive and press enter it should boot up to that .

An external storage-device has four major components:

* the USB cable

* the power-adapter

* the disk-drive inside the enclosure

* the USB-to-disk-drive adapter inside the enclosure.

One of these components has failed.

Try a different USB cable.

Try connecting to a different USB port on your computer.

Try connecting to a USB port on a different computer.

Take a "multi-meter" and measure both the voltage and amperage output from the AC adapter, and compare with the specifications on the label on the adapter.

Open the enclosure, and remove the disk-drive, and then connect it as a "slave" disk-drive in a desktop computer, to see if it works at all.

Purchase a new, compatible, disk-drive, and install it in the enclosure, to "revive" your external storage device.

Get the part-number and serial-number from the label on your disk-drive, and access the manufacturer's web-site, and use "check warranty status", to see if they will replace the device, at minimal cost to you.

There exist commercial "data recovery" services that can try to repair your device, just long-enough to rescue and copy your files. For example, see: https://services.seagate.com/index.aspx?lng=en-US for a "no data - no charge" guarantee.

Last time I saw this problem the harddrive was accessible, but not within Windows. I had to resort to booting into MSDOS at a lower level. The harddrive failed and the portion of the drive that had the problem was visible, but inaccessible. I was able to recover everything but the most accessed portion of the drive which happened to be what I was needing. The client then was required to send the drive to Silicon Valley to which it was taken apart in a clean room and the data was extracted for a price of $3500.

Check your BIOS > StartUp sequence
Maybe the USB boot option has much higher priority that HDD boot. Try exchanging their priority and then reboot, with your external HD connected to pc.

Since you have tried connecting the hard drive (HD) into two computers (Win7 and Vista) and both of them had the same problem, you may want to try replacing the cable of the HD.

Another thing, try connecting the HD into a Windows XP computer and see if same thing will happen. If you're hearing a clicking sound while the HD is turned ON, I'm sorry to say but the HD is no longer working. That clicking sound is also called the "Click of Death".

Thank you!

you need to give it a drive letter

A more reliable way to do this is via the computer management console

Start / Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Computer management / Disk Management.

Your drive should show up in here.

if it says Healthy and just above that gives the file system eg. NTFS or FAT32 etc it should be fine but may just need a drive letter.

If it does dot say any of those then right click on it and use the format option. Select how you want to format it (NTFS for XP is preffered)
and then tell it to do a FULL format. and also give it a drive letter !
It may take a while but I find it more reliable overall.

If it didn't have a drive letter then right click and use the Change Drive Letter and Paths option, then add a drive letter and use the one it offers.

I like to re-boot just to be sure windows sees it properly

I am assuming the external is connected while booting up, if so then the laptop may be seeing this unit as a bootable drive. You would need to enter into the BIOS of the laptop and change or make sure the external drive (i.e usb connection) is disabled. Save and reboot with the ext disconnected, log into windows and when it has finished loading, connect ext drive. I hope this helps.

Data recovery software.

Check this link:
http://www.software.com/view/8384/72/easeus-data-recovery-wizard-professional-4-x

You can enter the bios on bootup by pressing a special key to force your computer to go into BIOS mode. What key this is varies by computer, often it is F8, F10, sometines F11. Anyway, use the key for your computer, and change to boot modus to not first boot from USB.

did you check the jumper settings.