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LaCie Big Disk Soft Clicking

Posted: January 16, 2010

I had this guy call me up the other day because his external hard drive stopped working. I told him it could be a few things and that I needed to take a look at it to make sure his data was safe. I got to his house, and a LaCie Big Disk 1TB external drive is hooked up to his iMac. I turned the drive on and started to hear a soft clicking sound.

Now then, because of the HFS/HFS+ filesystem that the Macs use, I had to install a few programs on my Linux laptop to attempt to read the drives: hfsprogs, hfsplus, and hfsutils. I don't know if I needed all of them, but I installed all three just in case. Once those programs were installed I plugged the enclosure into my laptop. Didn't even see that there was a hard drive there, let alone attempt to mount it.

So then I took the enclosure appart to find two 500GB hard drives. I took my SATA/IDE to USB adapter and plugged one of the drives onto my laptop and this time it recognized the hardware, but still refused to mount it. Same thing with the other drive. When I plugged the hard drives into my external power supply from my SATA/IDE to USB adapter I noticed that there was no soft clicking. This led me to believe that it was a power issue, so I told the owner that I would take it home and see what I can do.

Once home I took it apart again and unplugged only the two power cables to the hard drives. I then plugged one hard drive into the external power supply I had, and the other to a spare SATA plug in my desktop. I plugged in the enclosure's power supply and turned it on then used the USB interface on the enclosure to plug into my desktop. And like magic it mounted. I realized earlier that it wouldn't mount the external drives seperately, so I had a feeling that the drives where using JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks), thus the need for me to use the enclosure's USB interface.

Now, I'm just waiting for the owner to return my message about what he wants to do (buy another enclosure, etc). I had searched around a bit about this issue and didn't find anything too usefull, so I decided to write this up in hopes that someone will find it useful.

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