Jim had called and asked about how to get his LaCie hard drive to show up on his desktop. After some errors and a restart of his Mac, it didn’t show up any more.
On the show, I had given him a couple of suggestions. Here, I’ll go over those again, as well as offer a few more. If you have an external drive that’s misbehaving, here are some tips.
The first thing to do with a wayward drive is make sure that your Mac is able to see it in any form. If you open “Disk Utility” (in Applications –> Utilities), you’ll be able to see any disk that your Mac knows about, even if that disk isn’t showing up on the desktop (in tech terms, you’d say the disk is not “mounted”).
Here’s a picture of my Disk Utility, showing my Firewire hard drive that’s not mounted.
If you don’t see your disk in this list, you can try the simple things like restarting your computer and restarting your hard drive (unplug it). If it still doesn’t show up, then you start trying some other things.
Jim’s drive was connected via USB, so I suggested trying different USB ports on the computer. Different cables can’t hurt, but they rarely turn out to be the problem. (Unless you have a wayward dog.) Jim’s drive also had other connections on the back of it. I suggested trying those other connections. (Firewire, for example.) Sometimes just one port of the drive (USB in this case) will fail, and the other one might still work.
If you’re still not feeling any joy at this point, and you’ve got stuff on that drive that you really want, it’s time to try surgery: the hard drive transplant.
Inside that external case is a standard hard drive. You could try taking the case apart (which will probably void any warranty) and pull out the drive. Take the drive into a CompUSA or Best Buy and tell them you want an external case for it. That will set you back anywhere from $30 to $60 or so.
There are two kinds of hard drive connectors, which is why I suggest taking the drive with you. Chances are it’s just a plain old “ATA” drive, but it could be a “Serial ATA” or “SATA” drive. If you know the difference… Yeah, I’d stick with just taking the drive in with you.
Take your new enclosure and install your old hard drive into it. Plug it in and see how it goes. With any luck, your drive will show up on your desktop.
Up to this point, we’ve been talking about if your Mac doesn’t see the drive at all. What about if your drive does show up in Disk Utility, but it still won’t show up on your desktop? (It won’t “mount”.) This gets a bit uglier. In this case, the drive is physically OK, but the 1’s and 0’s on it are somehow messed up.
If you don’t have anything on there you care about, you can try erasing the disk with Disk Utility and starting over. I’ve written about that here. I’d keep a close eye on the drive. If it so much as twitches again, consider replacing it, as it may have some physical flaw that causes data corruption.
If you do have data on there you really want to retrieve, you need to start going after some drive rescue utilities. I use one that’s called “Disk Warrior”. It is the tool to use when nothing else will work. I’ve used this to pull a couple of drives back from the abyss. It’s about $100, but if you’re in a jam…
If all of this has failed, then it probably means that the hard drive itself is somehow damaged beyond repair. It’s time to send the disk out to a specialist and see if they can get your data off of it. Be warned, this can quickly run in the thousands of dollars and there’s no guarantee that it will work. A friend of mine spent $12,000 getting his thesis pulled off a dead notebook drive.
This is why backup is so important! More on this for a later post.
