404 - Hard Drive not found

August 1, 2005 2:27 PM

Methinks my fairly young firewire HD has died. Has it?

I've had this 250G HD from Lacie for about 6 months now (I use it with my powerbook -- 10.4). It's been great, but Saturday it stopped responding. The LED stays red (it normally flickers to yellow when accessing) at all times.

I was using it immediately prior to its failure (I had literally just finished one movie and was moving on to another) when the playback started to falter, then failed, then the drives unmounted.

I tried to get it to respond for a while, then let it rest overnight. The next day was the same story, but I found that if I leave it plugged in, it will eventually mount (after a wait of 5-6 minutes). Trying to view the files in the finder can be achieved, but only after waits of 3-4 minutes, at which time the LED flickers and I get data. As an experiment I tried copying files over to my local HD -- it successfully transfered about 50megs then craps out (I suspect because the OS timed the request out, not because the HD did).

Is it totally dead?

posted by o2b to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Have you tried mounting it on a different machine and/or Disk Warrior or Disk Utility. You also might want to try a different cable. Have you installed any software recently?

In my somewhat limited experience, hard drives fail in one of 2 ways: the disk media fails or the drive stops spinning. In the first case you would get read/write errors and in the second it would fail to mount. So your drive doesn't seem to have either of those problems.
posted by doctor_negative at 3:35 PM on August 1, 2005

File this under possibly related: My firewire drive crapped out on me a month or two ago. I can not remember if it exhibited the same mount-then-wait behavior but I do remember that it refused to finish a repair via the disk tool. It would hang somewhere midway through and never finish. In the end I removed the drive from the enclosure and hooked it to the internal IDE chain. From there the disk happily checked and now works fine again in its enclosure.
posted by darksquirrel at 3:39 PM on August 1, 2005

LaCie enclosures are infamous for failing. The drive is probably fine, but it's impossible to tell based on the information you've given.

To second what darksquirrel says: Try taking the drive out of the enclosure and putting it in a different one, or put it in a different machine as an internal drive. (Can't do this with a Powerbook, unfortunately -- hope you have a friend with a desktop machine.)

Also the whole thing should still be under warranty, so LaCie should fix it or give you a new drive. You could ask them if they'll try to preserve the data on your drive, or not.
posted by xil at 4:34 PM on August 1, 2005

Could just be bad sectors, believe it or not. Hard drives these days are pretty smart about managing bad sectors, but operating systems continue to be pretty dim about making use of that stuff.

If a hard drive sector fails, the drive will typically (a) try to read it over and over and over, often making click-clunk noises between attempts as it recalibrates its seek mechanism, in an attempt to get a good read; (b) mark the sector "reallocation pending"; (c) return an error to the OS. The next time that same sector is written to, the drive will remap it to a spare location to avoid the bad spot that's presumably grown on the disk surface.

The trouble with this scheme is that on something like a media file, where you're just reading all the time and never writing back, the remap never gets a chance to happen and you just get the sloth and error every time. Also, if the bad sector happens to occur in the File Allocation Table, it will slow things down for every single file access and would certainly make mounting the drive a painful process.

If your problem is bad sectors, you'll hear a lot of quietly desperate clunking as the drive tries to go about its business.

To fix a bad sector, you just have to write back to it. Some slightly braindead drives will refuse to fix a bad sector unless you write back all-zero data.

A pretty reliable fix that doesn't involve buying disk repair tools is to (a) find out which files contain bad sectors (b) delete those files (c) write out a new file full of zeroes that fills up all the rest of the space on the drive, so it's guaranteed to re-use all the bad sectors (d) delete the file of zeroes.

On Unix-based OS's, all of that is easy; on Windows, you have to do a bit of fiddling to make (c) happen.

If you can't make that work, it's likely that one of the drive heads is dead, and you're looking at a new drive (and paying a professional data recovery service if there's vital stuff you need to get off the old one).
posted by flabdablet at 4:43 PM on August 1, 2005

I've found the same thing happens with my non-firewire external HD--same situation your describing, with it simply blinking red, accessing, etc for minutes and minutes and then finally accessing, only not fully.

It could be dead, but mines still ticking--I found the way to get it to work was to completely unplug everything and plug it back in. There's one cable that has an LED part on it; even when the HD is off that light is on. So by disabling that 'power source,' or whatever it is, it, from my best assumptions, "resets" everything, and it works again. Of course you may have tried this but it sometimes can be the simplest of things.

Any aural clues? Grinding noises? I know from (mistakenly) running games off my external it's very unstable now, and makes loud grinding noises, as does my brothers storage drive which just happens to, well...suck.

Anyway, best of luck--I know the feeling of 'loss of data.' During a thunder storm the other day, the power went out and twice my PC had trouble reading both internal drives. Scary shit.
posted by Lockeownzj00 at 10:23 PM on August 1, 2005

makes loud grinding noises

Unless you don't care about the data, back that puppy up and take her to the graveyard.
posted by realcountrymusic at 5:50 AM on August 2, 2005

This is all good info, thanks. I am getting the back and forth sound from the drive, so I suspect flabdablet is on the right track.
posted by o2b at 7:43 AM on August 2, 2005

A friend of mine has had horrible problems LaCie external drives on Macs. I've got 5 that I use on my windows machines but have yet to have one crap out on me. Anyhow, everytime he's had one blow (4 drives now) it's been the Firewire bridge that's blown, not the drive itself.

One of my drives blew, when he used it, but fortunately it was one of the triple interface models so I got my data off it via the USB2.

I'd say to pull the drive out of the case and slap it into an appropriate new enclosure (they're fairly cheap) long enought to get your data off it, then arrange a warranty return with laCie.
posted by HK10036 at 8:01 AM on August 2, 2005