Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with lacie

How many hard drives does it take, before WinXP can see them?

jadepearl — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:42:29 -0800

External hard showing "weird". Better known as, sharing an external/portable hard drive between osx and winxp. I have tried out no less than 3 of these Lacie external hard drives.

They are formatted FAT32 and register perfect on my macs at home. However on 2 WinXP machines they register as a regular drive, are listed as "full" and nothing can be loaded or read from them. This all started because they initially could not be found on the winxp though device manager "saw" them just fine and disk managment found it "healthy". I got it enabled and allocated a drive. Now it does not show in disk management. This is what I have done so far:

1) Reformatted one on a mac for pc -- still not "mounted" though seen by device manager. Forced allocation using disk management. Unable to format on the PC to NTFS after it mounted. Unable to read or write because "full" or not recognized;

2) Plugged in a "virgin" FAT32 drive after forced allocation and it can be seen but now only registering as a drive with no further info and again, "full" cannot read nor write nor found by disk management;

3) MacDrive 7 unable to find or read the drives initially until I forced allocation and again, no read nor write nor formatting. App keeps asking where the mac drive is;

WinXP service pack 2 on my machine; hard drives connected via USB 2.0; Novell Zenworks and network drives are a part of my environment.

The drives are new and Lacie is generally a reputable firm. FAT32 should be able to be read by a WinXP machine. This is a consistent problem after trying 3 drives. Any advice would be nice.

Help with TestDisk - Recoving LaCie Hard Drive

charlesroper — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 18:06:54 -0800

My LaCie 500 GB external hard drive is being uncooperative today - its main partition was deleted somehow. I wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary, just plugged it in and Windows saw it as a blank disk. Although I see the lost partition in TestDisk, repeated attempts to recover it have proved to be fruitless. What should I do now? I have found the partition in TestDisk and I've even written the partition table (through TestDisk). But every time I reconnect the drive, "My Computer" shows it as "Local Disk" and I'm asked if I want to format it.

For what it's worth, I downloaded the demo of Active@ Partition Recovery 5.0 and could also see my lost partition - but I don't want to waste the $35 to buy it on the off chance that it has the same trouble as TestDisk.

Any cheap and easy fixes to this problem?

I'll be up all night working on it - have to get a project off of it.

Protecting a LaCie desktop hard drive?

The Bridge on the River Kai Ryssdal — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 14:45:41 -0800

Are there any protective covers or cases available for the LaCie d2 Quadra? The radio program I work for recently lost its original 500 GB LaCie d2 to almost exactly this accident, and now it's being replaced with the same model. I've looked around the web for some sort of protective case that could prevent something like this from happening in the future (unfortunately, keeping it in one place without moving isn't feasible) but I haven't had any luck finding products that would fit. Does anyone make a case that fits a d2 Quadra?

amateur hard drive swap, or road to sorrow?

Admiral Haddock — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 13:06:06 -0800

Can/should I re-use the enclosure for a hard drive I have outgrown as a housing for a new hard drive, or should I just buy new? Either way, what should I be buying? I have a MacBook, and I need more storage (looking for 500GB to 1TB). I have a credit with the Apple Store, and I had been thinking about the 500 GB G-Drive. Call me flighty, but its most recent review was negative, and I got a little spooked. I searched the various older posts on the green, and nothing quite addressed this situation. I would be using the drive for backup and storage of media files.

Then I got to thinking, why buy a pre-made unit, when I have a perfectly usable enclosure with a too-small hard drive in it? The enclosure was for a firewire LaCie Studio Drive (circa 2002). The drive inside is an 80GB IBM Deskstar Ultra ATA/100 EIDE drive. The G-Drive would have been $300 at Apple. A 500 GB Seagate drive is just $125 or so at NewEgg.com.

I am comfortable with a simple swap and setting jumpers etc. What I don't know is:

1) whether ultra ATA / EIDE is a current technology or some relic that I should avoid;

2) what the difference is, if any, between EIDE and IDE and whether they are compatible etc.;

3) if I just add my own drive, what drives are good/bad? Is Seagate OK?;

4) would it be better to start fresh (i.e., not with a 5 year old enclosure)? If so, what enclosures would be good? USB 2 might be preferable, as I would like to set it up with one of the new airport base stations that allow a networked drive via USB 2.

5) is this just a dumb idea?

Thanks in advance.

Purchasing an external drive. Questions...

dobbs — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 15:05:38 -0800

Need more hard drive space... am about to buy a 500 or 600 gb external (LaCie) drive and mentioned it to a friend and she said not to go higher than a 320 due to overheating problems. Experienced MeFites, what do you say? Also, being a Firewire person, I have a dumb USB 2.0 question: can they be chained together? Any other drive anecdotes that might be useful in my purchase are appreciated. I'm on a Mac. She also says the 500s are just two 250s in an enclosure. This seems impossible to me as they look physically to be the same size. True?

I need help unbloating an external drive

FlamingBore — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 00:04:43 -0800

Tag&Rename bloated my external drive and now I can't access the drive. Is there an easier/faster way to get my files off the drive? Per numerous suggestions here on the green I downloaded and started using Tag&Rename to clean up tags and grab album art on the 12k MP3 tracks, which I store on my 160GB LaCie external drive. I was merrily chugging along when it started throwing errors. Something to the effect of "out of space". Seemed odd because those tracks and the other files on that drive only took up about 70gb of space.

I've since found out from an FAQ on the Tag&Rename website that there is a known issue with the rewriting of files on systems that have System Restore enabled, as I did.

So now my drive is inaccessible. From using a file recovery tool I can see the files are still there. So I've started using some tools (DriveRescue, which crapped out and now only lets me pull one file at a time; and FileRecovery, which lets me pull more, but craps out after a while too) to pull over files onto another external drive.

Might there be another way to go about this? The LaCie shows up as a volume, but is not fully recognized. If I try to open it I get "The disk in drive E: is not formatted. Do you want to format now?" Is it possible that if I was somehow able to delete a file from the drive I might get WinXP to fully recognize the drive? If so, how might I go about deleting a file?

If that's not likely or wicked difficult to do, are there faster or more reliable (in terms of selecting a chunk and letting them run) ways to move files from the LaCie to the new drive?

Thanks in advance!

Will our Protools backup scheme work?

jon_kill — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 05:33:40 -0800

A few questions about our Pro-Tools setup. We're concerned about performance and backing up data. What we had considered doing was:

a) purchase a Lacie drive (160 GB Firewire) ( to hang off our laptop Mac OS X 10.4) and persist our Digi 002 Protools (LE version 7) sessions.

b) purchase an external DVD writer and burn the sessions from every day onto DVD for the back catalog.

Can anybody foresee any problems with our setup? Might there be a more cost effective yet equally secure way to do it?

Can't burn a CD on external drive on OS X...

dobbs — Sat, 01 Oct 2005 17:26:56 -0800

Problems burning a CD on an external drive using an iMac G3 600 with Tiger Okay, so my mom has a g3 600 with 340mb ram. I plugged in an external firewire cd burner and tried to burn a disc (I'd yanked it out of a windows machine and stuck it in an enclosure). No dice. It tells me "Burning the disc failed because communication to the disc drive failed (Error code 0x80020022)."

I figured it was the drive was too old or crap. So today I went and bought a USB 1.1 drive off some guy who had it hooked up to a slower G3 iMac (I think it was a 300). This is a Lacie 4x4x24 external drive.

I get the same damn error.

When I bring up the Get Info box on the CD after it gives me the error, the disc is locked and I can't unlock it (it's greyed). It also tells me the capacity is zero kb (though it was empty when I checked the info before trying to burn it).

I went to Lacie's site to see if there were any drivers. Nope. Either it's too old or doesn't need them.

The drive appears in the iMac's system Profile under "Disc Burning" as

Firmware Revision 3.0D
Burn Support: Yes (Apple Supported)
Cd-Write: -R, -RW
Write Strategies : cd-tao
Media: No.

WTF? I have to deliver this machine and drive to another city tomorrow for my mom and it's driving me nuts.

All I can think of is that maybe my blank CDs are cd+r instead of cd-r but I would think if that were the case they wouldn't appear on the desktop as 'untitled cd' when I put them in, would it? (The discs have no packaging to confirm.)

Any help appreciated.

My LaCie FW 512 GB HD won't STFU

psmealey — Thu, 12 May 2005 12:22:03 -0800

I use a LaCie 500 GB firewire hard drive for backing up my files and running my iTunes library on it (I'm running OS 10.4 - Tiger). Even when I don't use it, it continues to make noise like it's still spinning. What gives? Is this an indication that something is wrong? I have my iTunes closed, and I'm not using any files on the LaCie yet, it keeps making noise like it's very engaged. I have done disk repair and everything, yet it's still making noise. Any idea how to remedy this? My googlefu yields precious little. Thanks!

External Hard Drive Failure

jruckman — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 16:56:54 -0800

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?

Question number 14874

psmealey — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 12:07:16 -0800

How robust/durable are LaCie firewire drives? [+]

Question number 11310

skylar — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 14:10:20 -0800

I've just bought a Lacie 160 gigabyte firewire drive. It's to be plugged into a Windows XP machine, but also to be written to and read by a Mac OSX machine. I want to format it with the FAT32 file system, but Windows won't let me. Is there a way to force the drive to format as FAT32? [More inside...]