[thrice]

Mods, if this is in the wrong forum...my apologies. Please move it to the right forum

Here's the story. I have an iMac G4 running Mac OS X 10.3.8. I recently update from 10.3.7 and my Lacie Big Disk 500GB Firewire drive would not mount on the desktop.

So I poked around the internet to try and find out what was wrong. While at Lacie's site I noticed that there was a firmware update for the drive so I went ahead and downloaded it and updated the firmware on the drive.

Now the drive will not mount and everytime I try to I get a message saying: "You are trying to mount a volume that OS X cannot read" and three choices 1) Initialize 2) Ignore 3) Eject.

I have about 250 GB of info on this drive that I would like to retreive (music and various backups..etc.).

Is there any way to retreive this info now that it's "not readble"

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again,
thrice

 

[DukeTogo]

Didn't 10.3.8 just come out the other day?
(Suggestion for the future, don't be the first to update... wait a week or more. Also always remove your external drives before updating. And backup if you can.)

Anyway, suggest you contact *** Lacie technical support ***

^^^

If you want to ask other people, then you'll also be better off asking this on a strictly Macintosh forum.

Your drive is actually two hard drives striped or spanned in one enclosure. This doubles your probability of data loss. However, it's unlikely that one of them died at the exact time you updated to 10.3.8. Still if you get past this hurdle, don't think you're free and clear forever. Sooner or later one of those drives will die.

I'd go and look for anyone else having the same problem. Macintouch often puts out reader reports on problems around the time of OS upgrades. Which is why I suggest not being the first...

PS. Don't click Initialize! Obviously. Also don't go running obscure disk utilities or programs that might be outdated. You would not believe how many people munge up their systems clicking every damn thing they can get their hands on.. like Norton from Mac OS 8 days. J#sus.

 

[errorich]

I have a friend who is VERY good at recovering hard drives. He worked for one of the big corporations who specializes in hard drive recovery and branched out on his own.

His email is info@darepc.com and his homepage is www.darepc.com. You won't be disappointed. He performs miracles and his prices are much lower than you would find elsewhere. Tell him Erich from SA sent you.

From personal experience though, when a hard drive won't mount it possibily means that your file system is corrupted. You could try something like checkdisk(the mac version) to see if it won't mount afterwards.

 

[thrice]

Thanks for the advice...I called Lacie today and talked with a tech support person. We were able to get the drive to mount and all is well now. I'm going to pick up TechTool Pro 4 soon and run the disk utlility on the eternal drive.

Whew, I thought I lost 100+GB of tunes...that's a relief!

 

[errorich]

First, congratulations!

I know the feeling, that gut wrenching feeling when you think you lost all your data. I had my entire cd collection on mp3 on a hard drive that was formatted(Gasp!) by a friend by accident. My cds are physically in another state so I can't get to them. I had to take a long walk to get my mind straight after that.

The next step in things you need to do is BACKUP YOUR DATA. Next time you have a couple bucks lying around go buy yourself a spare hd, or a stack of dvds and back that stuff up. You'll thank yourself later.

So what was the tech's advise and how did you get your hard drive to mount?

 

[thrice]

Thanks, yeah when I thought I might have to rerip everything I was very sad, but tried desperately to remember, they're just files.

He had me run the firmware update program again (showed me how to force it to update the drive). Then unplug and plug it all back in. That seemed to work.

 

[sonny24]

I cannot recomend your friend, martin dare from darepc...
darepc may be a fine place to go for some recovery problems, however, I believe they (it is just one person actually) do not have the equipment & know-how to handle more difficult problems. While other recovery outfits appear more expensive, they do not charge for parts to try recovery. You will find out after-the-fact that darepc does charge money for parts before knowing if it can be recovered & you'll end up spending money for parts even if no recovery occurs (& he will claim others do this as well which they don't). Also, the supposely more expensive places guarantee a thorough analyses will occur within a specified & short amount of time after they receive your equipment. Then they will fix it, if possible, within a relatively short amount of time (again specified). You will not get either of these from darepc nor will you neccessarily get timely communication. In the end, I paid out a couple hundred dollars, waited months, had to initiate much of the communication, & got my equipment back with no recovery. I am also not so sure my drive is now not in worse shape than when I sent it as he claims to have attempted a head exchange.

If others on here are having problems try http://www.ReWave.com instead or some of the available software

I am also wondering why someone keeps posting about having this 'friend'.