Lacie Hard Drive not being recognized on computer

A little research has suggested that many Mac users are complaining about similar symptoms.

Some people are pretty sure that your clicking sound is the sound of hard drive death; others are less convinced. Since that quick fix for a buggy Vista wasn't applicable to you, here are some basic troubleshooting steps you can take to get to the bottom of your problem:

The first thing I would do is plug the hard drive into a different computer. This will determine if it is the computer you want to use that is giving you the trouble, or if the problem is in the hard drive (or its connections.)

You didn't mention if the Lacie HD used to work on your mac and just stopped working, or was a new item for you. If it is a new item for you, then I would make sure to try it on a Windows PC, since they read more types of file systems than MAC's. If the drive was formatted to NTFS then it would be PC-accessible only, and would need to be changed to FAT32 to be read by a MAC. This can be done on a PC in a non-destructive way.

If it doesn't work on a second PC or MAC, then the drive itself may have a hardware error, or the case may have a problem. For example, I found this solution elsewhere on the FixYa site:

"I took
out the Harddisk from the Lacie case (it is a Seagate Baracuda SATA),
and put it in the empty internal HD slot of my Powermac G5. It appeared
under the original name on my sektop, and I copied the data to the new
Lacie I bought immediately....The disk doesn't seem to make strange noises when placed in the G5 internal slot."

If you or a handy friend want to try taking the harddisk out of the Lacie case and installing it inside your computer or in a different external case, I think that would be a good idea.

Lastly, I would run disk partition/management software to analyze the file structure of your hard drive. On a PC, I can run commercial tools from Acronis and Paragon that will look at a harddrive which doesn't show up on the computer, and rebuild the system files that operating systems need to find files. This fixes harddrives when some necessary system files are corrupted and the operating system won't see it at all, or will see it but not see any files and want to format it. Free software is available if you goggle for it, and I would suspect the same types of tools are available for MACs, although I can't give you any names.

I hope that helps.


A little research has suggested that many Mac users are complaining about similar symptoms.

Some people are pretty sure that your clicking sound is the sound of hard drive death; others are less convinced. Since that quick fix for a buggy Vista wasn't applicable to you, here are some basic troubleshooting steps you can take to get to the bottom of your problem:

The first thing I would do is plug the hard drive into a different computer. This will determine if it is the computer you want to use that is giving you the trouble, or if the problem is in the hard drive (or its connections.)

You didn't mention if the Lacie HD used to work on your mac and just stopped working, or was a new item for you. If it is a new item for you, then I would make sure to try it on a Windows PC, since they read more types of file systems than MAC's. If the drive was formatted to NTFS then it would be PC-accessible only, and would need to be changed to FAT32 to be read by a MAC. This can be done on a PC in a non-destructive way.

If it doesn't work on a second PC or MAC, then the drive itself may have a hardware error, or the case may have a problem. For example, I found this solution elsewhere on the FixYa site:

"I took out the Harddisk from the Lacie case (it is a Seagate Baracuda SATA), and put it in the empty internal HD slot of my Powermac G5. It appeared under the original name on my sektop, and I copied the data to the new Lacie I bought immediately....The disk doesn't seem to make strange noises when placed in the G5 internal slot."

If you or a handy friend want to try taking the harddisk out of the Lacie case and installing it inside your computer or in a different external case, I think that would be a good idea.

Lastly, I would run disk partition/management software to analyze the file structure of your hard drive. On a PC, I can run commercial tools from Acronis and Paragon that will look at a harddrive which doesn't show up on the computer, and rebuild the system files that operating systems need to find files. This fixes harddrives when some necessary system files are corrupted and the operating system won't see it at all, or will see it but not see any files and want to format it. Free software is available if you goggle for it, and I would suspect the same types of tools are available for MACs, although I can't give you any names.

I hope that helps.