Anyone familiar with macs & external hard drive issues?

LaCie is crap; never use 'em!

Coffee - you haven't answered if the heat was unusual for the drive. You should definitely turn off drives when not in use - all electronics degrade (albeit perhaps slowly) when powered. Fanless drives can easily cook themselves.

Dare I say it, you should have a backup drive that you keep copies of important stuff on, which you refresh regularly. Drives will all eventually fail.

Most important, perhaps, is that you should try the drive in another enclosure, but DON'T RUN ANY CONSUMER RECOVERY SOFTWARE and DON'T TRY TO WRITE ANYTHING TO THE DRIVE until you've decided for sure that you won't be sending it to a recovery service. Everything you try to do will make their job harder or impossible.

Of course, if you had a Glyph drive, they'd handle this for free: http://glyphtech.com/site/support/datarecovery.html
 
I use a G-Tech drive as my daily work drive and a Lacie for backups.

Jay, if there is anything I can do to help, just let me know,

Chris
 
if you use a recovery software, I think the two standards are disk warrior and data rescue.

if you are going to send the drive out for recovery service then the above advice- don't run anything on it- is good advice. the more you do, the more potential that info on the drive will be overwritten and not recoverable.

in weighing your options, my understanding/experience is that these services will be very expensive and the consumer software can be quite helpful. disk warrior and data rescue are in the $80-$100 price range. i used them recently to clone a drive and resurrect it. if you do this yourself, be aware that it can take a lot of time. it can be hard to be patient when you fear the loss of so much work. but if you can spare the loot and absolutely can not loose your data, you may be best served by further researching recovery services.

for further support, if you go to the apple website:

-- click on the support tab
-- click on the discussions link
-- click on your model computer

this will lead you to a bulletin board similar to dvxuser where you will be able to find data recovery topics with helpful users like the ones on this board.

best of luck. really hope things work out for you. if you think I can be of further assistance, don't hesitate to send me a message.
 
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It looks like the drive is on it's last leg, If you are near an apple store or a computer store you trust and work with take the drive in and ask for help in recovering what data you can from the drive. Do not use the drive or attempt to reformat it or all is lost.

I have hand a problem like this last year and with the help of a apple tech at tha apple store did recover 75% of what was on the drive. As for your question of leaving the drive on all the time when you working on the computer the drive is on when the computer is off make sure the drive is off .

Because of the problem you are having I switched for Lacie to Seagate drives.

I wish you good luck.
 
Ok, thanks guys. I downloaded and installed FileSalvage last night and it's still running and reading something from the drive. I'm just hoping that when I get home it'll have good news for me.

JY, that's a nice forum they have over there. I signed up and will keep close to that forum. Thanks man.

ullanta, no that wasn't normal for the drive to get that hot.... not good.
 
Coffee-

just an fyi: I don't know the specifics of filesalvage, but my experience with data rescue and disk warrior is that they would run 8-12 hrs per run cycle. I was informed that it is possible for them to run quickly, or to take several days. Just mentioning it because I aborted several cycles thinking it was stuck and that turned out not to be the case.

Glad you liked the forum, the response wasn't as quick as it can be on here, but there were very smart and helpful users, if you give them a day or so to get back to you.
 
Yeah I noticed that as I was filtering through old threads over there.

I ran filesalvage for about 5 hours and noticed that it was maybe 7-10% into reading the drive. I'll keep you/everyone on the progress (if any).... this sucks hard core.
 
If you don't have any success with filesavage, definitely give DiskWarrior a try. I used it a couple of weeks ago to repair an external drive with excellent results. Why do these things always seem to happen when projects are just about finished? Good luck.
 
Not to jinx myself but lacie has been good to me but Maxtor has been the worst. 5 Maxtor drives died on me so far in the last few years and all my others including Lacie have been strong. I never shut off my machines or drives by hand, I use the power saver feature but they say not to keep shutting off anything because the constant heating and cooling off of the components wear them down faster.
 
Disk Warrior has done a very good job for me recovering disks that have had corrupted file structures. It's been a standard tool in my kit since the first day I started using Mac OS X. Backups are the best prevention, and for "soft" crashes, Disk Warrior is the best cure. File recovery services can be very expensive, best thing to avoid having to call them is to have a solid backup strategy.
 
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