External hard drive only works on some macs

Hi guys,
I have a bit of a peculiar question here...

I've had a LaCie BigDisk for about 3 years now, and it's been running beautifully so far. Until I went on vacation this summer and had the drive turned off for about 3 weeks (let's just say it's been turned on a LOT before that).

Upon returning home I found that the disk didn't mount when started, the blue light would flash continuously and it would make a very low humming noise, not the higher pitched one it makes when it spins up. After leaving it turned on like that for about 20 minutes it suddenly seemed to realize it was supposed to do something and mounted up just fine. I was able to copy files to/from the disk without any problems.

However, that was just that one time. After that it's been unable to spin up and mount no matter how long I keep it turned on, or turn it off and on. The weird thing is though: it's ONLY dead to my iMac, and it's dead to my iMac in both Leopard and Snow Leopard.
I've tried it on my old Powerbook G4 and on my Macbook Pro, and it spins up fine. I've also tried connecting it through FW 400 (instead of 800) and through USB, but no matter what it's dead to the iMac, and that's the computer that needs the disk.

Any clues on this? I tried searching, but it was kind of hard to phrase the question...

thanks for any help you've got!

Have you tried to look at the drive in Disk Utility on your iMac?

Yes I have, and the drive checks out fine!

It's as though the iMac has stubbornly decided to forget that this is a hard drive?

So it can see it no problem, but just won't mount?
Have you run a permissions check?

I'm curious...how old is this hard drive?

If it's really old...the problem could be intermittent at the moment...which could be signs that it may crash sometime soon.

I would recommend copying and or backing up any important files on this hard drive just in case a hard drive crash may be in your near future.

HTH,

- Nick

Kevriano: no, the iMac doesn't cause it to spin up at all, so it's not visible.

pigoo3: The drive is about 3 and a half years old and has been running what could perhaps be called "excessively" in that time. The peculiar thing to me though, is that the problem is intermittent on the iMac, ie, it'll SOMETIMES spin up and mount (either instantly or after several minutes), but it works EVERY time on the other two computers I've tried it on.

This leads me to believe the problem lies both in the hard drive and in the iMac somehow?

Maybe it's just not getting enough power from the iMac. If it spins up on others it seems odd.
Is it externally powered btw?

Kevriano said:

Maybe it's just not getting enough power from the iMac. If it spins up on others it seems odd.
Is it externally powered btw?

Click to expand...

Exactly my thoughts as well ...... if the disk is USB powered it might not get sufficient power from the iMac.
Can you try another USB port ?

Cheers ... McBie

I agree that would sound like a plausible problem... however, the disk is externally powered by a brick and is connected through FW800. I've tried connecting it through FW400 and USB, and it makes no difference.

All three connection methods work on the other computers though.

Did you try testing other things in the iMAC ports? Maybe the ports became fried. LaCie is a pretty trustworthy brand as far as externals go. Although, they are all machines in the end. Hmm... interesting case though.