No pc manages to read the Lacie external hard drive, I receive a non-formatted message (whereas it contains data). Any ideas?

Likely the drive came formatted for a PC; also likely that the existing data is PC based.. Reformatting the drive for your Mac (a good thing to do) WILL erase the existing data, but you may not need it...

If you want to save it anyhow, just drag-and drop whatever's on the Lacie (before formatting) to your desktop (maybe in a new folder if you'd like).

Then format the LaCie for the Mac (with journaling is best) and once done, you can drag the stuff you put on the desktop back onto the hard drive.

Hope this helps

Yes, don't worry! The dread "drive not formatted" error message generally indicates hard drive problems. It can occur for many different reasons including a virus infection, hard drive problem, power surge, or problems with the operating system, etc. If you receive this type of error message, it is important that you act carefully to keep your important data safe.
1. Do NOT click "yes" to format the hard drive in case that the formatting process makes things worse.
2. Do NOT attempt to write anything new on this hard drive in case of any data loss.
3. Download an unformatted hard drive data recovery freeware to restore all your inaccessible pictures back successfully:
http://www.freeware-fix.blogspot.com/2013/03/unformatted-hard-drive-recovery-freeware.html
In fact, this data recovery freeware helped a lot as the hard drive of my friend was mistakenly formatted. All his stored data on this drive was gone. But, fortunately, he found this freeware in a popular forum thread and tried it on his computer. It is really fantastic and finally restores all his wanted data back. That's why I recommend it to you. I believe it will also work perfectly on your drive.
Simply try to apply it here:
http://www.freeware-fix.blogspot.com/2013/02/photo-recovery.html
4. Save and back up all your restored data on a different hard drive in case of data recovery failure.
5. After the data recovery process, simply format this drive to see whether it can work functionally as before.
In the future, you should learn a lesson to be more careful about your data and always back it up well.

The click comes from the reading head of the hdd, the beep comes from the pc when encounters an error. If the power source of the hdd hasn't been specifically designed to support both voltages, when you plugged it in for the first time it fried. It and all the data on it are gone.

Try a replacement USB cable first, and test the LaCie on a different computer, to ensure the fault is on the external storage unit, and not a computer system problem.

There are two possibilities:

The LaCie USB/ATA controller board is faulty.
In this case you can simply take apart the enclosure and mount the disk into a new enclosure. New Lacie are SATA, but double check the hard disk connector to ensure.

The hard disk inside is faulty.
In this case repair may be expensive. You need to locate a data recovery facility with a 'clean room' , the cost is usually more than $800.

If this happened after a power surge, then the problem is most likely a faulty controller board.

If instead you have dropped the hard disk it is possible an hard drive failure, in that case repair will be expensive.

A replacement enclosure will stfrom art about $20 on Ebay or Amazon, and must not necessarily be LaCie.
Check if your LaCie is Sata or PATA (IDE) before buying the enclosure.

the Mac may not recognize it if it is formatted with NTFS. I believ most Macs can read FAT32 and other formats but not NTFS. You could hook the drive up to a modern PC, transfer the files there for a while, format the external drive to FAT32 and copy the files back to the drive. The Mac shold read them now,

Try connecting the Lacie to another computer, if it doesn't work then the hard disk may need to be formatted using Disk Manager. I suggest you format as a primary partition in FAT32.
If it doesn't work then it is possible that the hard drive in the Lacie has failed.
To test the hard drive, remove it and connect it to an USB hard drive adapter and connect it to a working computer's USB port. If it deosn't detect it as an external drive and you connot open folders and files then it is faulty.
You can install a new hard drive in the Lacie and then format in FAT32
There are companies that can recover data from faulty hard drives BUT it will cost you an arm and a leg for their services.

Don't know about the MAC part, but an I/O error implies that the either the source file cannot be read or the destination drive will not write. This is usually an indicator of a bad HDD. To check, I would attempt to connect the external drive to another computer. If it still gives the same indication, contact the drive manufacturer about data recovery recommendations

I would first plug it in to a different PC, this will tell you if the problem is the Lacie or Windows Vista.
if it works on a different PC then remove it from Device manager or go to the Lacie website for Vista updates.

If it does not work on a different PC then there are 3 possibilities
1. the drive got cleared data lost
2. the enclosure is bad (I would bet on this)
3. the drive is bad

purchase a USB enclosure, remove the drive and install it in the new enclosure plug in and test.

Hope this helps
thanks for rating

have you had this drive long if new then go to the control pannel on the mac and find the Amiistrative Tools open then computer managment open then Disk Mangement then open and find the unallcated drive then properties then partition format partition then go to nxt step then follow till end excepting all defaults as hdd is formated for pc not mac so id is needed to be reconised on mac. close all windows then in my computer you should now see hard drive letter if not turn off drive then return on.

Some LaCie drives ship out formatted FAT32 so they will be ready to use on either a Mac or a PC. If you are getting error -50 when copying to a LaCie drive, or any drive formatted for PC, it is because of the following: Certain characters that can be used in a Mac OS X filename are not allowed in MS-DOS filenames. This can prevent the file from being copied, and can occur when a filename contains non-printing ASCII characters, or any of these characters: ? / \ < > " | > *. Either copy the data off of the drive and use Apple's Disk Utility to erase the drive in Mac OS Extended format, or change the filenames of the documents that cannot be copied. Hope that helps http://www.lacie.com/us/support/index.htm?rid=10033 I also noticed there are some patches for LaCie drives. You may check out the patches before the format. Let me know what happens. Tim