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Question Firewire drive not recognizing

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dmitriy1980

Junior Member
I have an old "LaCie 500GB Firewire400 / Firewire800 3.5" External Hard Drive 300871" and I'm currently on Windows 10. I followed instructions on https://www.studio1productions.co...wire-1.htm and other sources to install legacy "IEEE 1394 host controllers", which i believe were installed successfully. When I boot up my external drive, I hear drive spinning (trying to do something) and I also see a blue/power button blinking processing something and after about 20 seconds it stops and blue light stops blinking and just stays as blue (meaning device is on). I went to Disk Management and do not see a drive there. What else can I try?

Thanks in advance.
 
I realize you posted this some time ago, but maybe this will help.

Windows PC's that offered firewire ports (there wasn't many) did not support all devices. As I recall this came down to licensing differences or different implementations of the spec between what Apple used and what PC makers used.

If you really need data off the drive, put the drive out and hook it directly up to your PC. You may need a $10 adapter for IDE to USB or the like.
 
Two questions:

1) How important is the data on that Firewire HDD?
2) Did your motherboard already have a IEEE 1394 port, or did you add a card?
 
Then you probably need to try another machine before anything else.
Try booting with a Linux Live CD and see what happens. Firewire might act differently within another OS.
 
If you decide to try to add a PCIe firewire card, Vantec still sells the UGT-FW210 which is a Firewire 800/400 card with TI chipset. It does provide Windows 10 drivers for the card, though you may have to download them from the Vantec website.
 
This may NOT be a Firewire issue, exactly. The discusion above focuses on how your system can recognize an external device that uses Firewire for its connection. BUT there is also the factor that this device contains drives in a RAID0 array. The problem MAY be that you do not have the RAID0 driver installed under Win 10 to be able to access the array.
 
I can't find complete documentation on this unit, so I have some questions. I note that some of the product descriptions I saw do mention the possibility of using a RAID0 array arrangement for speedier access. But I could not find any related details of how that is done.

1. A RAID0 array requires at least two HDD units, plus a controller and software drivers, etc. You have said that this unit you have was in a RAID0 system. Why do you say that? I can imagine an external box that does contain two HDD's inside plus a controller board. Such a system might be set up to use EITHER a RAID0 array structure, or a simpler JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) array, depending on how the user chooses to use it. Either option would require that the box contains two HDD units, though. Do you know what is in there, and how it was used before now?

2. I can imagine also that a RAID0 system could be arranged if you had TWO of these units connected by Firewire ports to a compouter, and the computer itself used proprietary software from LaCie to operate them together as one RAID0 array. Was it ever done that way?

3. I note also that the manual I found says the units arrive pre-Formatted for a Mac system, and any Windows user would have to do a Partition and Format operation to get it ready for use under that OS. Was this unit you have used previously on a Windows system?
 
Thank you all for your comments. I contacted SeaGate who apparently purchased LaCie some time ago and they were able to accommodate data recovery free of charge. I sent them my drives last week, so we'll see what happens.
 
Thank you for the update!
Many people just ask questions and then disappear, leaving the others wonder what happened next. 😀
 
I've seen cases like these as well where there are responses but no follow up. But this is not how I operate and expect the same from people I work with as well, so not a new concept for me.
 
Best wishes for a speedy recovery! I Know, it's trite, but it just happens to fit your situation. I love puns!
 
Quick update: Just got an update from SeaGate that the data from one of my drives have been recovered without specifying how much data. They did say that the data will not be organized in the same folder structure as I had it. They are sending the data back to me now while working on the other drive. I'm excited.
 
dmitriy1980 said:
Quick update: Just got an update from SeaGate that the data from one of my drives have been recovered without specifying how much data. They did say that the data will not be organized in the same folder structure as I had it. They are sending the data back to me now while working on the other drive. I'm excited.
Click to expand...

Thats great.

I have had to have data recovered a few times. When we get the data back, its not organized at all. You may end up with system files in folders mixed in with photos or documents. So will take a bit of work to track it all down, but at least you will have it!
 
Got a 2TB drive from SeaGate. It appears about 120GB of data was "recovered". I went through every single file and none can be used. Spoke with number of people at Seagate, they consider it as a failed recovery and there's nothing else that can be done. From their perspective the drive was in a very bad shape as it might've been fried due to power surge or something like that.

At this time waiting for news on my second drive. Hopefully more luck with it.
 
No luck with the 2nd drive. Received "Due to the severity of the media damage on your drive, I'm afraid in this case nothing was recoverable" response.
 
dmitriy1980 said:
The problem is that my computer doesn't see the drive when I connect it.
Click to expand...
If Seagate can't recover anything (or whatever they were able to recover wasn't what you needed), I'm not sure what else you could do.

There are other data recovery companies out there you could try if you want to spend a lot of $$$$, but outside of that your data could simply be gone.

This is why having good backup practices of data you can't afford to lose is so important.
 
dmitriy1980 said:
Got a 2TB drive from SeaGate. It appears about 120GB of data was "recovered". I went through every single file and none can be used. Spoke with number of people at Seagate, they consider it as a failed recovery and there's nothing else that can be done. From their perspective the drive was in a very bad shape as it might've been fried due to power surge or something like that.

At this time waiting for news on my second drive. Hopefully more luck with it.
Click to expand...

Those files ^^^^^^^, they could appear corrupt when trying to open via normal programs, but still contain recoverable data.
 
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