its a lacie 500g,its just making a clicking sound and its as though its not plugged in i.e. its not showing up when i look in my computer..sometimes i get a mesage on screen prompting me to insert the CD that came with it but when i do nothing happens,its been installed on this pc for about 3 years and its worked fine untill about a week ago.

it contains all my music and a load of work files is there anyway i can retreive them?

simple answer is yes and will cost about £200 plus and you have to send it away, the place then will send you a loan driver with the recovered files on them.

There are many places on the net that do it, just shop around.

I've had this happen to me and it's very very hit and miss to bring things like this back to life without specialist help.

its a lacie 500g,its just making a clicking sound and its as though its not plugged in i.e. its not showing up when i look in my computer..sometimes i get a mesage on screen prompting me to insert the CD that came with it but when i do nothing happens,its been installed on this pc for about 3 years and its worked fine untill about a week ago.

it contains all my music and a load of work files is there anyway i can retreive them?

Yep,you can retrieve them from your backup copy.... (Sorry, not much help really)

Check the LAcie website, there was a dodgy batch!!

There is a place in sheffield that recovers data

I had a couple of Lacie Hardrives die on me with the dreaded hissing/clicking sound.

It was actually the external power supply that was knackered rather than the drive itself. Apparently its a well known fault.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTZ7EvSJnng

http://www.lacie.com/uk/support/support_manifest.htm?id=10337&article=1033

I'd check the power supply before giving up hope on your hard drive. If you have another power pack try that or borrow one if you know someone that has one to lend.

The new power packs are available seperately for around £25 depending on the type

Can you remove it from the caddy and fit it inside the PC tower this will eliminate the caddy power supply

Can you remove it from the caddy and fit it inside the PC tower this will eliminate the caddy power supply

Exactly what I was going to suggest, if it ain't actually spinning up properly you can try the freezer trick (at your own risk of course, but I believe in the theory), if it's something really important you could buy and identical harddrive and start swapping components!

Failing all of the above (and any other suggestions)hand it over to the recovery people.

Can you remove it from the caddy and fit it inside the PC tower this will eliminate the caddy power supply

yes try that ^^ ive had one that did just what your saying....spin n clunk, turned out the controller in the caddy was no good.

what you could do then is this.

Remove the hard drive from the caddy and test it in your pc or someone elses, if it boots and you get the data off it then simply buy another caddy which maybe cheaper and easier then getting a replacement power suppy ? You can buy empty caddies that you add your hard drive to for less than £10 off ebay.

This will then mean if it's a Lacie issue tou will have bypassed any further issues from there on in.

its a lacie 500g,its just making a clicking sound and its as though its not plugged in i.e. its not showing up when i look in my computer..sometimes i get a mesage on screen prompting me to insert the CD that came with it but when i do nothing happens,its been installed on this pc for about 3 years and its worked fine untill about a week ago.

it contains all my music and a load of work files is there anyway i can retreive them?

Have you tried turning the Hard drive on its side or upside down and then booting up?

My External 300 GB Toshiba decided not to play ball once, so out of desperation I tilted the drive on it side, and it worked!

I would think generally most content on a hard drive can be recovered by simply replacing or switching the caddy, so don't despair your files and music are quite likely to be recoverable even if your lacie mechanically has given up the ghost.

The clicking noise could be bad news (depends on the kind of click). Try taking the drive out of the caddy & putting it in your computer, as the others above suggested. If that doesn't work & the drive only makes bad noises, it'll need specialist data recovery, which could be expensive.

Take regular backups of anything important in future, hard drives fail.

The drive might still be in it's warranty period, I'm not sure about Lacie, but some are up to 5 years. Check on their website. They'll only send a replacement empty drive though, not your data.

Sorry, it seems obvious, but have you tried it in a different computer?

You don't want to store your data in one place... you want to store it in two places at least... that's what you want to do. (Helpful advice from a Harry Enfield character.) So, you want to consider getting one of these (http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/product.htm?pid=11140) or these (http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/product.htm?pid=11254) next time and use RAID 1. Mind you it won't help you in the case of a fire, et cetera, or theft - so you want to maintain an off-site backup - that's what you want to do. Online storage such as BackBlaze (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backblaze) may be of use here though where a large amount of data is involved and you don't need it away from home you could simply maintain two external hard drive stores with one being kept off-site each time it's updated - though one more is always better to save you going backwards and forwards.

Put it in the freezer.

thanks for all your suggestions,i'm hopeless with computers so i think i'll try the freezer one and turning it upside down etc but if that fails i'll have to take to a shop..thanks again

After you've got your data back this time, make a backup, this will happen again, hard drives do fail (as someone already said).

After you've got your data back this time, make a backup, this will happen again, hard drives do fail (as someone already said).

without our sounding thick back it up to where?????? the external drive has near on 500gig of files and my computer only has a 200 gig hard drive.

Buy a 2nd 500 Gb external drive, duplicate everything to that on a regular basis (depends on how often it changes and how much you can stand to loose), then put it somewhere safe (fire safe maybe, or an external {dry} building, or work, or a friends).

Hard drives will fail, it's just a matter of time when. Annoyingly I had 2 LaCie Lego HDs fail one after the other. So no time to get data off. One backed the other up.
Don't think anything important was on there as they were used to back up data off other drives, but with 25+ HDs I sometimes lose track.
Out of curiosity - anyone know how to open Lego style HD as there seems to be no obvious way and looking online was of no help. I don't buy LaCie anymore as now I stick to Samsung which are quiet and very reliable. Only ever had one fail on me, but it was dropped whilst on - so user error.

Buy a 2nd 500 Gb external drive, duplicate everything to that on a regular basis (depends on how often it changes and how much you can stand to loose), then put it somewhere safe (fire safe maybe, or an external {dry} building, or work, or a friends).Use something like Clone 2.1 (http://newtonsoftware.co.uk/clone/) [PC] or Chronosync (http://www.econtechnologies.com/pages/cs/chrono_overview.html) [Mac] which will automatically back up any changed data of your chgoosing to a second drive and also synchronize deletions too if you wish. However if data is corrupted on master, then the corruptions will also be copied across.
So in reality you should archive important data to a third HD or DVDs/BluRay and which you don't update only just add to archive data and backup incremental changes on the second disk.

Out of curiosity - anyone know how to open Lego style HD as there seems to be no obvious way and looking online was of no help.

Unfortunately that one's got a screwless case, you have to open it from the bottom with a lot of care & twice as much swearing (taking care is optional, swearing is necessary), though you can get them open with no damage if you're careful.

Pictures that may help here (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bartclaeys/2462751758/)

thanks for all your suggestions,i'm hopeless with computers so i think i'll try the freezer one and turning it upside down etc but if that fails i'll have to take to a shop..thanks again

don't do the freezer trick unless its a last resort... you should remove it from the caddy first and try it in a PC on its own..

it needs to be removed from the caddy to be put in the freezer any way, you shouldn't put the whole thing in the freezer.

The freezer trick supposedly only allows you to have one last crack at getting the data off so make sure you have another drive to port it across to straight away if you try it. (Read up on the methodology further afield rather than just here.) I tried it once with a 2.5" IDE drive which was clicking and wouldn't mount but had no luck - though at least the data wasn't mine but some foolish friend's - i.e. they had no backup despite getting plenty of advance warning of imminent disaster via S.M.A.R.T. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.)

Thanks for that Steev. I tried trawling net for exactly that and found nothing.
Once you know how it's meant to open, then you can apply brute force where it's needed!

I bought some of the infamous IBM 'Deathstar' series, which developed the clicks of death the day I discovered that there was an issue with a batch from Hungary factory.
During numerous class action lawsuits IBM denied the very obvious and known about problem, in the process they ruined their previously good reputation and shortly after left the HD business and sold up to Hitachi.
Simon in N2C on West Street managed to get mine working long enough to retrieve all the data. Give him a try. The main thing to do if you are getting 'clicks of death' is not to use HD at all as you will probably be damaging surface of drive, which reduces the likelyhood of data retrival.