My USB external Lacie HD has decided to die on me. It is linked to my laptop and I am fairly careful with it. Though this morning xp is saying that it isn't formatted and do I want to format. Of course I bloody well don't as it has 230gb of music and films. In explorer it has 0bytes. In properties the file system is RAW. Last night I did my usual of "safely remove hardware" before turning it off, unplugging and putting away. Today turn on link up etc. but it seems to have lost all data and format Any suggestions? Cheers Stuart
Have you tried plugging it into another computer? If you get the same result, its possible that the ide to firewire interface is not functioning properly. That or for some reason the data magically became corrupt. If it were me, I would say to hell with the warranty, open the lacie case, take out the drive, and install it in a PC directly. I understand you have a laptop, but if you have access to a PC its worth a shot.
djscoop is right on with that one. First try another PC's USB port and then, remove the HDD from the enclosure, but note that the HDD might be set to MASTER while it was in the external case, and would need to be jumpered to SLAVE before installing it into a PC.
The box is fairly well sealed. I tried it USB on another computer and same thing.. Right waited for the US arm of the company to wake up and the tech support guy told me that it is most likely data corruption. So he said to use a data recovery program. So any ideas of a good freeware and a good payware (made that description up) software to use?
