I have a Lacie Big Disk Extreme. I've been using it for a while now (months) and now it is not being recgnozied by my computer. I see the option to remove it, but I do not see the drive in my folders. What could be the problem?

Now the drive is showing up, but all of my folders are gone! There are just files in thr root directory now.

Now everything is there....it would appear that these Lacie Drives are crap....or at least mines is faulty.

Glen,

It's been discussed in other places on the net but you are probably dealing with a heat build up issue. Make sure you keep that thing cooled even if you have to add a small fan blowing on it. Not the answer you wanted to hear, I'm sure.

-gb-

Thanks. But to be fair to Lacie, I have been powering down the drive before I shut down my computer. I did this a number of times before realizing that this is probably not the right thing to do. BUt I will definately keep it as cool as possible. So does this mean that my drive is about to die? Or does it simply mean that I need to get an additional fan behind it A.S.A.P?

Cooling: Well you can get a table fan to blow over the drive as that should cool it well. If that doesn't fit the problem temporarily, I would suspect it's not the cooling at fault. If the fan is spinning, it's unlikely it's the cooling.

Cool the power supply too if possible.

2- I would definitely backup your data now!

3- It's possible the drive is failing. You might be able to get the SMART readings from it (SMART warns you of drive failure). When I'm not busy I will check if Speedfan on the PC platform can check the SMART readings of external drives.

Not sure if there are Mac utilities that can get SMART readings.

4- If you have a Lacie that has two physical hard drives in it, one drive going down means all the data is lost. Not fun.

SpeedFan does in fact have SMART capabilities.

XP has done a check of the drive on its ownupon reboot...and it has reported a small amount of bad sectors. I guess this is not good.

Bad sectors usually indicate the drive is going to die (from my experience with a few drives). You should definitely copy off your data.

You can try a PC utility called Spinrite if you have trouble recovering stuff off bad sectors.
www.spinrite.org
(Never actually tried it on a drive with bad sectors.)
You may need to mount the drive internally to use Spinrite. It may not work if the Lacie has two drives inside it because that's RAID or spanning at work (no idea what happens; spinrite might work).

It might be possible that your drive just developed bad sectors and is not going to fail soon.

If your drive has file structure problems, the utility Active Undelete can also help. It also costs money. You can try the demo. Do not install it onto the Lacie drive of course.

LaCie drives are pretty god from my experience, the onboard striping chips can sometimes overheat which cause these problems, but if one drive dies in that case, they will all die..

one thing about the Lacies, keep it turned on and allow the system to power it down. Never turn off the drive as it could be in the process of reading or moving its read head. Lacie drives PSU are pretty good and they respond to the power control fed through firewire

<<<-- Originally posted by Peter Jefferson : LaCie drives are pretty god from my experience, the onboard striping chips can sometimes overheat which cause these problems, but if one drive dies in that case, they will all die..

one thing about the Lacies, keep it turned on and allow the system to power it down. Never turn off the drive as it could be in the process of reading or moving its read head. Lacie drives PSU are pretty good and they respond to the power control fed through firewire -->>>

This maybe the cause of my problems then. Also, I've noticed that when I reboot XP it does a Hard Drive check of the Lacie now...and 36KB out of the 400 gigs are in bad sectors. Does this mean that my hard drive is definately going to die soon?