I purchased a 160GB external LaCie USB 2.0 drive last month from CompUSA, and today it quit working. I have an iMac G5 running OS X 10.3.8, which told me the drive could not be recognized, and whenever I turn on the drive, it gives me a pulsating screeching sound as it tries to access itself. I called LaCie, who says its a hard drisk mechanism failure (read: "our shit crashed and lost your data") and will repair the drive, but everything on it is lost unless I recover it beforehand somehow. DriveSavers is going to cost me some $2,000 or so which is outrageous, considering I'm a college student, and the drive was investment enough itself. It has some 40GB of music, and almost 100GB of video -- I'm looking for a service that can recover my data cheaply, and without voiding LaCie's warranty would be a plus. Does anyone know of any alternate solutions, have you heard of this happening to someone else or has it happened to you? WTF?
posted by jruckman on Feb 28, 2005 - 11 answers