I bought a 250gb Lacie external drive back in Jan 2006 which has always worked fine up to this point. For some reason, I haven't been able to access it for the last few days though. When I plug it in, my laptop recognizes that the (F disk is connected, but things become extremely sluggish when I try to click on or around it (such as in My Computer). It gives me no details about the contents, and when I double click on it I get a "Device not ready" error after like 10 seconds. And if I unplug or turn off my Lacie drive, everything gets fast again. I'm worried my external hd kicked the bucket, but if that's the case then why does my computer recognize it at all? I don't understand why it's bogging down everything when I try to go to it. Does this sound like a recoverable thing? I hadn't backed everything up yet (ironically, I was in the process of doing so this week). Also, I defragged my (C drive a few days ago, which was around the last time my Lacie drive worked correctly. Might this have anything to do with it, or just a coincidence? Thanks for any help.
The last part ou explained id say is coincidence. I worked on a computer at my computer shop i work at and i ahd the same problem, i had an external someone brought in and it was hard to get too and very sluggish. what could be and most likely is the problem is that you external hard drive may have a failure. this can be casued by bumping the hardrive or moving it around while it was spinning. People forget with external drives that since they arent in the computer their good enough to be moved when running... WRONG not at all its still spinning at 7200 RPM. Now im not saying you did that, but its possible someone accidentally hit it or you moved it and the little heads hit the disk. If it reconizes the hard drive but the harddrive cant open the heads are having trouble getting a connection becasue their probably damaged. id say run any drive utilities that came with the hard drive and then use spinrite if you can. if that doesnt work get a new hard drive and and use your favorite program to recover the data off the drive. i like Acronis. hope it helped sorry for the problem.
