LaCie Recent Questions, Troubleshooting Help & Support

You got a loose wire or faulty cable. Best take it down to the shop and git em to fix it. Should cost ya around $10

I have damaged a few external drives, by power interruptions. Sometimes the damage is too much to get access. However on three occasions (3 different 3.5" drives) I managed to get them to be accessible, by mounting them inside a desktop computer, and connecting them to the power and data connections (EG To Sata power cable, and to Sata sockets on the motherboard.) Windows (or the motherboard) appears to be more tolerant of slightly damaged drives. Two of those drives are still mounted within a couple of my desktops, and have not faltered since. HTH, Rob

How old is the drive and has your set-up always behaved exactly the same way or what's different now, please? Does this happen only with Word files or what? Is that LaCie's own Disk Utilities, or what Mac OS are you using which pluralizes that?

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 .

Are you connecting it to the Windows now? If yes, Click on START > Run - type diskmgmt.msc You will see your drive listed here Right click and click on format (do not proceed if you need data on the drive) Once done, you should be able to use it.

you can try a new lead or power supply. If it is internal just buy another monitor as not a DIY repair

It sounds like it has failed. If there is anything important on there take it to a data recovery expert who will charge a lot of money to attempt recovery of information. otherwise put a sledgehammer through it and trash it.

Go to Control panel then select devices a then DVD/CDROM drive and see if your drive is listed and working properly. If not then you will have obtain the drives to install the drive If you have the model number of the drive, search with Google for the drivers on the Internet. and install the drive Remove the old drive in Control panel.

This wild mean the file system of the hard drive is set as something other than NTFS or FAT/FAT32. Mac and Linux would be able to read it just fine but due to the limitations of Windows, it wouldn't recognize the file system.
Google the program ext2read. It will enable reading of another file system in Windows.

I found that Nero program works with anything

Bob, I had a similar problem with two LaCie external hard drives. LaCie doesn't manufacture hard drives, they only purchase drives from other companies, like Seagate, and mount those drives in LaCie external enclosures. If the drive is nearing the point of total failure, then your Mac is letting you know that point is very close. You had better find a new backup device to use. The Mac will let you access the drive for a while longer, but if you do not act, there will come a point when the Mac will not be able to read the data on the drive and any backups you have there will be lost. When you get a new external hard drive to use for backup, you may not need to do anything with the current drive that is failing, as long as you do not anticipate that you will need anything from the backups that it contains. You can set up the new device as your primary backup. I would then advise that you perform a total backup on the new device ASAP, so that you are not left without at least one good backup.

Remove the hard drive from the lacie box and plug it in directly to your computer to see if the drive is now recognized. If it is the issue is with the lacie box electronics. If still not recognized with a direct connection to computer, see if the bios sees it. If not, the logic board on hard drive is fubar and you have a serious recovery problem.