After working with a few different techie friends, and after a serious session with a certain online comrade (whom I won't out unless he wants me to do so), we came to the conclusion that my hard drive might be revivable. To that end, I spoke to LaCie's tech support, and eventually, after explaining my situation and conclusions to a support supervisor, was asked to write an email that they could pass to their developers, who "would do their best"... So I'm now waiting for them to come up with a previous version of the firmware, stick it in an installer, and email it to me. We shall see.
Meanwhile, for those who are truly interested, here's the letter in its entirety:
LaCie Development Team,
My name is Stu Mark and I am a customer of LaCie (have been for a few years now, probably since 1995 when they were part of Quantum, and I was a Quantum customer since the mid-80s). I have at my desk a LaCie D2 Big Disk (Triple Interface) with a serial number of 152802252.
A few weeks ago, the drive began booting slowly, sometimes necessitating a reboot. I ran several different Mac OS X drive check applications (Disk Utility, etc.) and the drive would report fine every time. However, the problem remained.
I checked the support section of your website and found the firmware updater, which seemed a possible solution. I ran the firmware updater, except that it seemed to downgrade rather than upgrade (the process happened very quickly and I didn't catch the firmware numbers). This, of course, alarmed me, so I ran Disk Utility again, except this time it didn't see the drive at all, as though it didn't exist. I ran the firmware updater a second time, and this time it informed me that my old firmware number was 0.0, and when I tried to update it anyway, the application force quit. This happened repeatedly upon subsequent attempts.
I tried swapping cables, switching from FireWire to USB, etc., but nothing worked. The only hope I seemed to have was that there was no mechanical noises out of the ordinary (The drive seems to sound as though it is spinning up, there are no clicking sounds or chirping sounds or grinding sounds, etc.). Also, if I force my Macintosh into Single User Mode, I can see the drive if I cd /Volumes
I thought (as did several other tech-folks with whom I'm friendly) that maybe an fsck_hfs would be in order. However, when running a cd /dev and then a ls -lias | more, the drive id didn't appear (which made running the fsck_hfs a bit difficult). I could still do a cd /Volumes and see the LaCie, and I could cd into the drive, but I could only see one directory, instead of the 10 or so that were on the drive originally.
At this point, I believe that my data (which is a little less than 9,000 family photos that I stupidly thought I was backing up, even though I wasn't) is there on the drive, and that if I could reinstall the firmware, things would improve.
I would greatly appreciate it if you would please pass this information to your developers, one or more whom might actually see a way to solving my problem.
Thank you for your kind consideration,
Sincerely,
Stu Mark
Redondo Beach, CA
2 Comments:
Hmm, you really did try quite a bit and you documented it in good detail, though I notice a curious lack of mention for the freezer method attempt :-)
LOL! Yeah, I sorta-kinda ooopsed on that, didn't I? ;-)
Well, the way I see it, all I want is an updater. How difficult is that task? Shouldn't be that hard. And, speaking as someone who has worked for software/hardware firms before, why don't they have the previous installers available for such cases?
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