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.com/Articles/Firewire-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.
For that "IEEE 1394 host controllers" driver you can open Device Manager and see if the drivers did actually install for it.
The only thing I'd question is if Windows 10 is actually compatible with it, or not.
Here's a search, some links are to people having issues with devices not showing up:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=firewire+windows+10+compatibility
Thanks for a response. Yes, it did show in device manager. I already went through a lot of differnt links. I'm asking very specific instructions someone can provide thinking outside of the box. Thanks
If you have access to another computer that isn't a Windows 10 computer give it a try on that - that would be one way to determine if the Firewire drive still works and isn't just some Windows 10 compatibility issue.
Make sure the device is set as a removable drive in Device manager.
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.
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.
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.
That's not good news, here's to hoping the other drive has much better results.
I guess with me being very paranoid with my backups it's good that my main 2TB backup USB HDD has two identical USB SSD backups of it.
I currently have 2 drives for backups, a backup of a backup if you will.
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.
35 minutes ago, dmitriy1980 said:
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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.
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You have nothing to lose now I guess so you might give this a go. It works on win 10 ( I used it once)
https://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=29
Taken from here
https://www.roadkil.net/downloads.php
The problem is that my computer doesn't see the drive when I connect it.
Can you not choose a different source, is it seen in a Linux CD?
I guess you won't have a docking station lying around (daft question I know) That is what a lot of places use to copy info off drives that cannot be seen on the actual machine.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dual-Bay-External-Duplicator-Tool-free-Supported/dp/B076H5P6Z1
A lot of things were already tried. Also, it's a enclosure connected through firewire. There are 2 drives inside connected in RAID. I do have docking station but it won't help here. A number of things were already discussed in this forum above and in other forums.
Thanks for feedback.
With two drives inside the enclosure with RAID that makes restoration more tricky. If it were just a single drive I'd recommend trying in different enclosure since the interface on enclosures is known to eventually fail at some point.
Perhaps your best action would be to ask on forums or sites dedicated to RAID that are knowledgeable with it before doing anything on the drive(s) that may be considered destructive.
Thanks for the comments. I think at this point there's nothing that can be done if the company wasn't able to restore it.