External hard drive no longer appears. How to try to recover contained data

[chscag]

Welcome to our forums. Before I answer your question, be sure to read the special notice in the forum announcements about these forums shutting down.

The LaCie external hard drives are famous for poor electronics and failing electronics. I'm guessing your drive is OK but the case and electronics are either failing or have failed. The remedy is to remove the drive from the case and use an adapter to get at your data. If the LaCie is still under warranty you do not want to remove the case as that will void your warranty. However, if you have data on that drive you need, the only way to extract it is probably what I suggested above.

 

[michelangelo]

Hey smorrison01. Be prepared to migrate out as the Mac-forums are now in a warp zone. And thank you for waking me up from a long absence from the Mac-forums. I got warmed-up by your post on my original thread. Welcome.

I failed in my recovery attempts, which was a big blow for me. So my advice is not really worth the read. Still:

1 - Members of this forum were extremely helpful, while I was full of ****, they all tried their best to help. Follow them to the new forum.

2 - My FireWire LaCie big is still alive today after my reformatting it with one pass of zeroes. It's current job is to serve as the Sunday clone of my MacBook Pro. Drivedx checks on it every sunday. So far so good. But most of my data was lost. Many dots of data were foggy on the surface of the disks by years of non-use. But overall, there was nothing broken in the disks nor in the case.

3 - Given the above, I believe it quite possible for spinrite to have been able to save my data: to have been able to understand and re-write a sufficient number of foggy bits of data. Spinrite, written in assembly language for perfection and speed is believed to be usable on a Mac with Wine. I have not tried that and cannot try it anymore, after having reformatted the drive.

Good luck to you.

 

[smorrison01]

Thanks chscag and michelangelo. I did see the notice about the forums shutting down - when I went to the forum home page after making my earlier post!

Because of that, I'll assume I might be shouting into the void, and you or anyone else may not see this or reply. Accordingly I'll assume that I have to do further research elsewhere.

BUT - in case you do see it and it's still possible to respond:
I understand your explanation in concept, chscag, but I have no idea what I'd be looking for if I sought out an adapter. Is there some example of what kind of adapter allows you to communicate with a partially disassembled hard drive, and/or where I might find such a thing?

Thanks again!

 

[pm-r]

Is there some example of what kind of adapter allows you to communicate with a partially disassembled hard drive, and/or where I might find such a thing?

I think what's being referred to is what is called a usb sata adapter or USB Bare Drive Adapter such as this at:
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/U3NV2SPATA/

Or most computer places and amazon, staples. etc…

And for more convenience, the various Docks are nice, i.e. but you may only need the bare dock:
https://eshop.macsales.com/search/?q=sata+dock





- Patrick
======

 

[michelangelo]

Also, given that Chscag was referring to failing electronics and case on a possibly non-failing drive, you also have, in addition to bare drive adapters and docks, the various more permanent cases (or enclosures) available at the same stores for about 10 to 20€ apiece. In my earlier situation, the electronics and case had not failed on me: the drives were only experiencing memory loss, mainly due, probably, to a very long period of non-use. My drives were top of line 7200 rpm drives with FireWire connectors (partially failing, to state the truth). One of my two cases contained two 500 GB disks. It was dead and its connectors were dead. I opened it and recovered the two disks one of them is in a case, serving as a backup drive. The other case, which was discussed along this thread, a LaCie Big, contains 4 times a 500 GB disks (totaling 2000 GB, or 2 TB) is still in use, not opened. Opening the case voids the warranty... And would be quite hard to reassemble anyway.

Last, given that your LaCie drive is USB only, it may not be top of the line and the probability of dead case or connectors is higher. HTH