RyanHarne.com

When I bought my first LaCie hard drive, I was highly recommended towards the brand due to reliability and GB/$. That was 3 years ago. When I bought my second LaCie hard drive, I was highly encourgaed to skirt the brand due to ridiculously high failure and poor drives. That was about a year ago. Today, I have 4 LaCie hard drives, 3 desktop and 1 portable, 1 of which was added to my fleet just yesterday.

To be fair, despite Jeremiah’s many hints to avoid LaCie last year, I have never had an issue. Since I back everything up twice over, I’m not even that concerned about a complete failure of a single drive. I remember my visit to him in Boston in 2005 when I came across his stack of 5 or 6 LaCie drives all daisy-chained to a single Power Mac G5—the cost of being in new media production, yet an elegantly-stacked cost.

So, what a shock to my data security ego when Becky’s LaCie hard drive failed in action. Granted, certain unfortunate events transpired to encourage the disaster, but it was a LaCie that died; a tear passed silently down my cheek at the news. The real catastrophe was that she was currently working remotely using this LaCie as her main disk, a drive which also contained some files that were backed up nowhere else. When a myriad of software data recovery solutions all failed to see the mounted volume, we were disappointed and appalled at the estimated cost given to us for data recovery from the industry pro in the field. It would cost a $3,500 fortune to recover the whole hard drive which, by the way, was the old RAID striped-0 LaCie Big Disk Extreme 500GB, for those savvy with the technical details. Since that LaCie actually used 2 drives to make a larger, single volume (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) the repair costs really rocketed at our specific misfortune.

A fellow Apple engineer recommended a fix but then recommended against it. This fix involved something that would make most tech nerds nauseous, and probably require some rehabilitating hours of WoW later. He suggested I hit the drive. Literally. Smack it. Like a rabbit ears television. Like that old lemon you bought from the car salesman with two gold front teeth.

Well, he actually seemed to recommend a smack more akin to spanking your eldest or most cherished child, but, a hit nevertheless. And, in the most controlled of environments, I did this.

It worked.

In order to turn this into a how-to, I will describe precisely how I did this so that you, too, can fix a broken LaCie hard drive and clench your stomach with each impact.

I chose a well-carpeted floor as the landing zone. To be specific, I wasn’t hitting the drive but rather letting it take a carefully-orchestrated fall. Some first drops were attempted and my method for dropping it was then selected. The LaCie drive would fall on its recessed power button with me holding the sides as it fell, making sure the impact was head-on and no side-to-side motion occurred. The rebounds were not stifled, so after the LaCie hit the carpet and rebounded, very slightly, I let that motion dissipate over time naturally.

The falls took place at about 5 inches from the floor and, again, allowed the LaCie power button side/surface to make carpet contact. Some non-powered falls proved to be pointless in drive recovery—it seems the hard drive needles are locked when the drive is not plugged in to a computer or wall power. In our case, one of the needles was jammed and a standard plug-it-in would result in 3 loud clicks of the needle before the LaCie would give up the ghost. Disk Utility would see the drive as nothing more than a mounted device, without any associated volume. The non-powered falls changed nothing, so, with reluctance, I began thinking how to compose the perfect powered fall.

Instead of simply applying power by hitting the power button, I decided the best thing to do would be to plug the FireWire cable into the back of the drive which would initiate the powering and data-reading sequence. The other end of the FireWire cable was always plugged into my MacBook so it was always powered and ready to start up an attached drive.

So, with the LaCie in hand, I plugged in the FireWire cable and listened as the platters began spinning up. I will point out that the platters were spinning perfectly, from both of the RAID 0 disks, and this may not work well, or at all, if your disks do not spin as perfectly as these were. If the needle wasn’t working, in our case, you wouldn’t be able to tell any difference in operating sound because the spinning disks sounded perfectly natural.

So, as the platters began to spin up the first jammed needle click resounded. At that, I dropped the hard drive onto the power button face. After a few drops, and full unplug-plug sequences (again, the clicking sound only happened 3 times, so only 3 attempts could be made during a single sequence), the drive finally mounted correctly in Disk Utility. However, the mounting took a very long time, upwards of 10 minutes. I was patient, though, because I knew something was different after the successful fall because the needle appeared to be reading correctly and making the appropriate hard drive needle noises (you know, the clicks of hard drive operation).

The first successful mounting revealed a greyed-out volume on the drive, but at least it was correctly named. When I unmounted the disk and plugged it back in, after another long period of gut-wrenching time and hard drive operating noises, the volume correctly mounted. Finder saw the volume and I could access files per usual. Over the course of the evening, I recovered all of the data and have since proclaimed this drive to now be my property since I resurrected it using nothing but the sweat of my brow and my unending benevolence. I may use it to toss unnecessary DVD rips onto, so that my Apple TV has some more content later on. I plan on allowing my inner acoustics geek to invent a special shock mount for the drive, perhaps some floating mechanism, so that the drive maintains some level of usability. I suspect that the shock therapy may ultimately prove fatal.

Nevertheless, I saved the expensive data recovery costs and was rewarded with a home-cooked dessert following dinner. Plus, I got to see some of the baby Preston photos which were only stored on that hard drive. I will admit that baby basset hounds are potentially the cutest puppies possible. They are, in fact.

Try this hard drive fix at your own discretion. It worked for me but it may not work for you. If you mess up, everything could be irreversibly lost; so evaluate how important the data is to you on your dead hard drive and consider if the repair cost is worth it. If you don’t have $3,500 to spend, don’t plan to have $3,500 to spend, or don’t care terribly much about the data to begin with—my fix is just for you. Enjoy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 5:50 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.