External hard drive failure - easy fix

A friend of mine recently had two daisy chained LaCie hard drives fail on him. Unfortunately, one was backing up the other. He bought a new LaCie and plugged it in and copied a recent job that he was prepping for delivery over to the new drive. Then his computer gave up the ghost and shut down for good. He bought a new computer, plugged in the hard drives hoping for the best but none of them would mount - including his brand new LaCie. Before shelling out a couple of thousand bucks for hard drive recovery, he brought the drives to the Image Mechanics bat cave studio for us to take a crack at.

If a hard drive makes an ominous clicking sound, it is about to die. Get your data copied immediately. Failure after a clicking noise usually means data recovery where they replace the hard drive controller or pull the platters out of your drive and rebuild them in a new mechanism (this is why data recovery is expensive).

If multiple external drives fail simultaneously, it is probably due to a power surge on your firewire port that burns out the controller in your enclosure. Remember that the drive inside your firewire enclosure is an ATA or SATA drive just like inside your computer. There is a firewire bridge that converts ATA to firewire. This bridge or controller is often the failure point.

We cracked open his LaCie drives, pulled the bare hard drive out and hooked it up to our Wiebetech DriveDock. His drives were fine. We sent him over to our friends at Melrose Mac to get a new enclosure for his bare hard drive and he lived happily ever after.

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