May 16, 2004: Soho 4
Since I ran out of drive space in late March, I've been storing my stuff on an external 120gb Lacie firewire hard drive. Yesterday it wouldn't turn on- even after we tried different computers, power cords, firewire cords, booting it up and down ten times, different ports, etc. Sadly, the whole Gowanus shoot was on there, which I was planning on running this week, so it may be a little bit light around here until I can recover the data or reshoot the stuff. Tekserve is one option, but data recovery runs $1000-3000 for 120gb drives. What I really need is someone who can pop out the harddrive from the Lacie case and get it running. Any ideas?
Update 5/17 1:45pm: I fixed it! Fed up, I decided to pop open the Lacie case, and discovered that it was just a Maxtor drive with some other circuit boards. I pulled out the drive, and Sam told me how to mount it as an internal drive. Presto- it's in the tower, working fine.
Comments
Sorry to hear of the hd failure. I lost 40gigs of scans a year ago on an external. Now I burn a lot of cds.
Sometimes a drive that won't mount on x will mount on OS 9, you could try that.
It is easy to swap the enclosure, there are only a few things to unlpug, so you could buy a new enclosure at comp usa and try that. (didnt work for me) The instructions come with the enclosure. its really easy.
Tekserve will not charge you if they cannot get the data, so i would go there if all else fails.
If they can't do it they send it to drivesavers in LA and you are right, it is thousands of dollars. If you have business insurance you may be covered, I was, but I elected to just rescan what i had lost.
Again, sorry about the loss, as always backup raw files to disc, and keep shooting.
Have you tried using DiskWarrior to try to recover it? Or is entirely a hardware failure?
Jake, no additional ideas on the Mac side, but depending on the drive's internal hookup, you could have someone who knows Unix put it in a Linux or BSD box and attempt to mount it there...these days most free Unixes are capable of mounting HFS+ formatted partitions.
Love the photos, BTW.
Looking forward to seeing the Gowanus shots.
Regarding that Unix/Linux suggestion that is one of the worst ideas I have ever heard.
Just take it to Tekserve. One of two things happened. Either the the case itself is broken or the harddrive itself is broken. If the case is broken, Tekserve can easilly take the hard drive out of the LaCie case and put it in a new FireWire case. The cost should only be the cost of the case and the labor for the swap. Not too bad. If the drive itself is busted, then the choice goes to the expensive data recovery route. But if it's just the case or the power-supply, the cost is quite cheap.
The hard drives in those cases are basically standard IDE/ATA drives that can be hooked up Internaally to any Mac that has IDE/ATA connectors. Another choice if you want to go the do--it-yourself route and open the case yourself.
glad to hear its working again. and surprised that you guys didn't try that on saturday - it seems like you tried everything else!
A hard drive failure makes you reconsider the pros and cons of backups real quick. I used the think the idea of a tape back would be a pain, but it's great to not worry about HD crashes and not have to burn 20 CDs every month.
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