A LaCie or portable hard drive that won't show up — what to check, and when to stop

Give it a minute before you give it another cable

The instinct is to start plugging things in. Resist it for sixty seconds. Connect the drive and simply pay attention: is there a light, is there that faint tremor in the case that means platters are turning, and is it making any sound it did not make a month ago. Those three observations put almost every vanished drive into one of three boxes — a connection problem, a filing structure that has come apart, or hardware that is on its way out — and the three boxes want three completely different responses. Everything people usually do first is guessing. The minute is not.

One observation outranks the others, so here it is early and without decoration. A drive that clicks, ticks, beeps, buzzes, or spins up and dies and spins up again has a mechanical fault: heads that can no longer read, or a motor labouring. Every further minute of power drags failing heads across the surfaces your files are recorded on. Unplug it, leave it unplugged, and skip to the last section. Nothing in between applies to a drive that is making a noise, and no amount of trying will make it apply.

Cheap suspects first, in order of cheapness

Work through the cheap suspects cheapest first. The cable, because the leads supplied with portable drives are made down to a price and USB-C ones fail more often than anybody expects. Then the socket. Go directly into the machine itself, avoiding hubs, monitors, docks and the front panel of a desktop tower, every one of which is flakier than a port on the back. Then a different computer entirely, if there is one about. And a mains-powered desktop unit — a LaCie d2 or 2big, a WD My Book — earns one extra suspicion. Where there is no light, no spin and no sound whatever, the little plug-top power supply gives up far more readily than the disk it feeds.

On Windows, the truthful account of what is attached sits in Disk Management, which you reach by right-clicking Start. A drive listed there but missing from File Explorer may have simply lost its letter, and giving it one back does nothing harmful. What you are watching for is a disk described as RAW or unallocated, or an invitation to initialise it. That means the index to the whole drive has come apart. The files are almost always still sitting behind it — and every fix Windows offers at that moment, initialising very much included, writes fresh structures over the ones a recovery would otherwise rebuild from. Say no, and keep saying no.

On a Mac, open Disk Utility and switch on View, then Show All Devices. A greyed-out volume under a device that is otherwise listed is common and often perfectly recoverable. Two buttons want treating carefully. Erase does precisely what the word suggests. And First Aid, run on a disk that has begun making an unfamiliar sound, puts tired mechanics under sustained load at the worst imaginable moment. While you are there, rule out the dullest explanation: a drive formatted for Windows will not mount properly on macOS, and an Apple-formatted one means nothing at all to Windows. A fair number of dead drives are simply on the wrong desk.

LaCie in particular, and the enclosure problem generally

LaCie kit gets used harder than most because it is sold to people who work: photographers, editors, designers, surveyors. Seagate has owned the brand since 2012, so the mechanism inside a LaCie is very often a Seagate one in an aluminium or rubber-armoured jacket — which matters, because the mechanism and the jacket fail separately. The commonest LaCie fault we see is not the disk at all: it is the bridge board that converts USB-C or Thunderbolt to the drive's own language. Light on, faint spin, nothing on screen, and no cable in the world will talk it round. Bench equipment connects to the disk directly, past the bridge, and reads it as though the enclosure had never existed.

That points at the wider rule: the enclosure is not the drive, but you cannot always separate them at the kitchen table. Some Rugged models and most modern WD portables encrypt everything in the enclosure electronics, so a disk taken out and plugged in bare reads as nonsense anywhere else — the key lived in the board you have just discarded. Which is a good argument for sending the whole thing rather than dismantling it hopefully. And retire the replug ritual while you are at it. A disk that needs five attempts to appear this week and fifteen next week is not being awkward. It is working to a schedule, and each successful mount brings the final one nearer. Those attempts are better spent on a copy than on a diagnosis you already have.

Where the sensible road ends

Norfolk adds a wrinkle worth naming. Salt-laden air along the coast, and the slow damp of a flint cottage or a boat shed, corrode contacts and board components over a period of years, and the failure usually arrives as a drive that simply will not power up rather than one that clicks. That is good news disguised as bad: corrosion attacks electronics, not magnetism, so the photographs are generally intact behind a board that has quietly rotted. It is board work rather than a lost cause.

Draw the line at any one of these: an unfamiliar sound, particularly following a fall; a RAW disk carrying anything you would genuinely mind losing; a drive detected less often with each passing week; or software that has ground away all night and produced nothing that will open. Past that line, the honest move is unexciting. Take the bare drive out if it comes out easily, wrap it so nothing can shift, and post it tracked and insured to the bench. Within 2 working days of arrival you get the fault named, a realistic account of what is likely to return, and a single written figure you can take or leave. There is no collection service and never has been — one parcel, and you are done with it.