My Lacie external drive clicks but won't spin up. It is about a year old, maybe less. It was working fine and just stopped working. It has not been dropped. In fact it hasn't been moved.

Inside the LaCie D2 250GB (300770) external harddrive's case, is a 250GB IDE (PATA) harddrive that is 3.5 inches across in width.

A desktop computer sized harddrive. (May be a Western Digital WD25000JB)

The harddrive plugs into a small circuit board, (Bridge board), and the circuit board has a USB port on it.

Using this Western Digital Passport for an example,

http://www.xbitlabs.com/misc/picture/?src=/images/storage/wd-passport-250gb/p3.jpg&1=1

Scroll down to the second photo, and left-click on it. The case of the external harddrive is shown open.
Inside is a 2.5 inch laptop sized harddrive.
An aluminum tape strip covers the small circuit board, attached at the back of the harddrive.

The second photo down on this page, shows you the small interface circuit board, that the harddrive plugs into, with the aluminum tape removed.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/wd-passport-250gb_2.html

(Another design has wires coming from the small circuit board, to an interface the harddrive plugs into )

It is this small circuit board that goes bad in a LaCie. QUITE common.

Solution?

Simple.
1) Obtain a 3.5 inch IDE external enclosure
2) Remove the 3.5 IDE harddrive from the LaCie's case.
3) Install the harddrive out of the LaCie into the external 3.5 IDE enclosure.

An example of a 3.5 IDE (PATA) external enclosure,

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1733195&CatId=2779

For additional questions please post in a Comment.
Regards,
joecoolvette

Hi... Problem with your external hard drive, pc don't recognize it...
it possible you have bad sector in your disk drive, or your usb cable is not responding.... the best way to find out open your box then take off our hard drive and install it into a pc and see if the hard drive work... or you box it self the controller inside our external box maybe damage,

It sounds like your Lacie has died as the clicking noise it the drive attempting to find the tracks on the disk itself and not suceeding . Most Lacie products have a 12 month warrantee on them and so would suggest taking it back to the supplier and getting it replaced
Hope this helps

Try a new power supply. $19.99 at Lacie. It worked for me.

I had the same problem twice, but it was the power adapters each time that were causing the problem. It wasn't the unit itself. Lacie replaced the power adapters and it worked fine.

We have a few of these Lacie Design by F.A. Porsche 500GB drives in our office. Our editor's drive stop working this morning (was fine the day before) and had all her files backed up from the last three years on it and was making a very soft clicking sound. After taking the whole thing apart and trying drive in another F.A. Porsche caddy with no success, we tried a different power supply hey presto it started up no problems. My drive that suddenly stop working earlier in the year we tried a power supply from a external Lacie DVD Writer and again drive is working. Just to make sure tried the original power supply and would not mount. So if your hard drive stops working it maybe the power supply rather the the hard drive.

perhaps this? http://www.lacie.com/us/support/support_manifest.htm?id=10253&guideid=10167

You're not missing any step at all, because with SATA hard drive if its really working your computer should
automatically detect it and since this hard drive suddenly stop working there's a possibility that its already
fried but if you want you can try this hard drive again to a different computer and if still not detected by
second computer its already dead.........

I just worked through this same issue with LaCie tech support and they fixed it- it was a bad power supply. Fortunately I had another LaCie drive and when I plugged the power supply from that one in to the "misbehaving" drive, everything booted up fine.

Just buy new external ( HDD ini is fine) just change the external for both off you