Is my external hard drive broken?

[MasterHowl]

Hello,

I have a 500GB LaCie "rugged" hard drive (one of the orange looking ones), and it's been acting strange lately. I get this message when I plug it in.

Now, it hardly ever leaves my desk, since I hardly ever take my MBP away from my desk. Is it broken? When I click "Initialise..." it openes Disk Utility.

I seriously hope it isn't broken... I use it to back my machine up and it's got loads of films on it then I ripped off DVDs. Please help me!

 

[Weaselboy]

Can you start Disk Utility and select the external disk then click Repair Disk?

 

[MasterHowl]

Can you start Disk Utility and select the external disk then click Repair Disk?

The "Repair Disk" button is greyed out:

It's split into two partitions too, but they're not showing up in Disk Utility...

 

[Weaselboy]

The "Repair Disk" button is greyed out:

It's split into two partitions too, but they're not showing up in Disk Utility...

Hmmm... not good. It shows on there as "unformatted". Unless you want to spend some money on a tool like Disk Warrior to try and fix it to recover your data, a reformat is all I can suggest. But if you were just humming along and now it shows no partitions, that does point to a dead drive.

 

[benthewraith]

Hello,

I have a 500GB LaCie "rugged" hard drive (one of the orange looking ones), and it's been acting strange lately. I get this message when I plug it in.

Image

Now, it hardly ever leaves my desk, since I hardly ever take my MBP away from my desk. Is it broken? When I click "Initialise..." it openes Disk Utility.

I seriously hope it isn't broken... I use it to back my machine up and it's got loads of films on it then I ripped off DVDs. Please help me!

Sounds like either corruption or death. Is the option to erase the disk greyed out as well?

 

[MasterHowl]

Hmmm... not good. It shows on there as "unformatted". Unless you want to spend some money on a tool like Disk Warrior to try and fix it to recover your data, a reformat is all I can suggest. But if you were just humming along and now it shows no partitions, that does point to a dead drive.

Sounds like either corruption or death. Is the option to erase the disk greyed out as well?

I think this option is working?

I emailed LaCie support, so I'll see what they say. I've got a feeling it's not going to come to anything though.

If it was corrupted, it wouldn't be the end of the world but it would mean hours and hours and hours of wasted time tagging films and ripping them from DVDs

What causes corruption? Is it just random? Is it safe to rely on this drive for my time machine backups?

Thanks for the replies btw

 

[Weaselboy]

I think this option is working?

I emailed LaCie support, so I'll see what they say. I've got a feeling it's not going to come to anything though.

If it was corrupted, it wouldn't be the end of the world but it would mean hours and hours and hours of wasted time tagging films and ripping them from DVDs

What causes corruption? Is it just random? Is it safe to rely on this drive for my time machine backups?

Thanks for the replies btw

It looks like you can still format it, but if this just spontaneously occurred I would not trust the drive. Sometimes these things just randomly decide to die.

 

[LaCieTech]

Image

I think this option is working?

I emailed LaCie support, so I'll see what they say. I've got a feeling it's not going to come to anything though.

If it was corrupted, it wouldn't be the end of the world but it would mean hours and hours and hours of wasted time tagging films and ripping them from DVDs

What causes corruption? Is it just random? Is it safe to rely on this drive for my time machine backups?

Thanks for the replies btw

Have you resolved the issue with our tech support team?
-TL, LaCie

 

[MasterHowl]

Have you resolved the issue with our tech support team?
-TL, LaCie

Hello

I did, thank you. The person I dealt with was very helpful. I'm sending it off next week to get repaired (it was still under warranty).

Thanks for asking