On Nov 26, 2010, at 9:59 PM, Tom wrote:
This is a 1 TB OWC Mercury Elite Pro external hard drive that I've had for maybe a year and a half. Today its icon just vanished off the desktop. The drive is still running, at least when I touch it I can feel the disk spinning inside, the case is warm, and the blue power light is lit. The drive seems fully alive, except that the computer can't see it anymore. I've tried both a FW400 and a FW800 cable to the G5 Mac, shutting down and restarting the computer, plugging the drive's cable into both the back and the front of the computer, but no matter what I do, the drive never shows up on the desktop. Disk Utility can't find it either. Naturally, I had some things on this drive that weren't backed up, because my 2TB Time Machine external backup isn't large enough to back up both this external drive and both the 1TB internal drives in the G5. So, sincis the external drive was fairly new, and reliable I thought, I wasn't backing it up. Mistake! Don't trust ANY drive, new or old! If I ever get this drive to show up again, I'm going to get the data off it and then immediately replace it with TWO new drives, one for the data, and the second one just to BACK UP the data. Meanwhile, does anyone have any ideas how I might get this drive to reappear on the desktop, so I can quickly rescue the data I want to save? Didn't I read something once about sticking a dead drive in the freezer for a while and trying it cold?
My experience with "disapearing" external hard drives generally have been a failure of electronics in the case. You might want to consider this possibility. This seems to be more prevelant with firewire than USB...
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