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PDR / The jobs we take in / LaCie drive recovery

LaCie · Rugged, d2, 2big, NAS

LaCie recovery for Plymouth. The case has gone dark; the disk inside it usually has not.

LaCie sells the case rather than the mechanism, which is why so many of these arrive looking worse than they are. Four kinds come in from Plymouth, Devon and Cornwall: a Rugged that stopped mounting after a fall off a bench, a d2 whose bridge board has quit while the disk behind it is untouched, an older Big Disk striped across two mechanisms with one of them down, and a network box that has died around perfectly healthy disks. The free diagnosis says which of the four you have.

Nothing readable? Most jobs carry no bill Free diagnosis, then one written price Boxes come to the lab from Truro, Newquay and Tavistock

You will be talking to an engineer
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LaCie symptoms, and what each points to.

Yours not here? Start at the triage →
What shows upWhat that points toWhat to do
No light, no spin, nothing at allThe adapter or the bridge board has given up. What is behind it is unharmedStop switching it on and off
A Rugged that started ticking after a fallThe heads have touched the platter. That orange bumper takes a lot, but not everythingLeave it switched off and post it in
A d2 that Windows will not mountUsually the bridge board, not the mechanism sitting behind itSend the case and the adapter too
One disk down in a 2big or Big DiskA striped pair: each disk holds part of every large fileSend both disks in, numbered by the bay each sat in
A network drive whose box has diedLinux underneath, with the array written by the box's own softwareSend the disks, not the empty box
A LaCie asking to be formattedA damaged file table. What it indexes is still down thereUnplug it and refuse the offer
Getting it to us: wrap it so nothing can shift, cover it for what it is worth, and post it tracked to the intake lab in Bristol. We cover the postage back. If you want an engineer to check the packing before the box is taped, ring first. It is spelled out on the contact page.

Four LaCie builds, and what gives out on each.

RuggedThe one in the orange bumper, and the one that turns up damaged most often. A 2.5in disk or an SSD, a bridge board for USB-C or Thunderbolt, and a shell that shrugs off most drops. What usually fails is the socket or the board, and neither of those holds anything.
d2 and 2bigThe desktop aluminium. A d2 holds one 3.5in mechanism; a 2big holds two and will happily run them striped. Both want a mains adapter, and a dead adapter looks exactly like a dead drive from where you are standing.
Big Disk, and its kinThe older two-disk cases, sold as one large volume and striped inside to get there. They ran warm, they were seldom backed up because they looked like a backup, and when one mechanism goes the whole volume goes with it.
The network boxesNetwork Space, CloudBox, 2big NAS and the 5big all run Linux inside, with the array and the file system written by the box itself. When the box dies the disks are usually fine, but they will not mount in a PC — Windows cannot read what was laid down on them.

What happens to a drive while it is here.

Cases in the log →
01

A number on arrival, then the free diagnosis Free

Whatever arrives is booked in under a case number on the day it reaches the bench. An engineer then works out the actual fault, and that part is free. You get a plain answer on what can come off the drive and what cannot, followed by one price in writing. Nothing further happens until you have read it and agreed.

Diagnosis at no chargeA single written figureYou owe nothing yet
02

The disk is read, not the case

Nobody here sits swapping cables on a dead LaCie in hope. The mechanism comes out of the shell and straight onto a bench port. Within a few minutes we know whether the fault is the enclosure around it or the disk inside.

Case, or disk insideSettled before we quote
03

Bridge boards, and the striped pairs

A disk that still spins is imaged before anything else. Where the heads have gone it is opened under clean air against a donor matched by model and batch. Where two mechanisms were striped, both are copied first and the stripe is reassembled afterwards from the images, never from the originals.

Donors matched to the modelStriped pairs assembled from copies
04

Short runs, with rests between

A worn 2.5in mechanism out of a Rugged is read in bursts with a pause between each, and the awkward regions wait until everything easy is safely down. Disks from a d2 or a NAS get the same. Jobs like that run to days.

Whatever the disk gives backFolder trees kept as they were
05

You give the word, and it ships back

Thinking it over costs you nothing. Everything the drive gave up is listed for you before any invoice exists, and the bill only follows your go-ahead. Files travel back on media bought in for your job, with return carriage paid at this end, and the case stays on the bench until you confirm they open on your own computer.

You see the list and decideWritten to fresh mediaWe pay the postage home

The faults we see most

  • The case fails more often than the disk — most LaCie units posted to us are dead on the desk, and the mechanism reads perfectly the moment it leaves the shell. Adapters, sockets and bridge boards wear out well ahead of the storage behind them.
  • Send it whole, with the adapter — a LaCie is not built to be opened at home, and a bridge board that encrypts is no use to you sitting on a shelf. Unless the disk is already out, box up the unit, its mains adapter and the cable that came with it.
  • Two-bay boxes are often striped — a 2big or an old Big Disk may have left the factory as RAID 0, so one disk alone is half a file system and mounts as nothing. Never let either be reinitialised.
  • The box's own repair tool will not help — a network LaCie offers to rebuild or reinitialise its volume, and doing either writes over the very thing you are after. The status page only reports. Run neither of them.

Where this one stops: hardware encryption inside an enclosure is real encryption. Without the password and without the original board the volume stays closed, and nowhere on earth is that different. Physical damage draws its own line: where a failed head has cut through the coating, the layer carrying those files went too. A striped pair with one disk truly unreadable returns only the surviving stripes.

A job out of the casebook.

PL · PLY-2026-0834LOGGED ✓

The Big Disk that stopped being recognised

It came from a photographer's studio at Falmouth: an older Big Disk that had sat under a desk ten years and one morning would not appear. Inside were two 3.5in mechanisms striped as one volume, one with a failing head and one healthy. Both were imaged first, the sound one in an afternoon, the weak one in short runs over three days. Stripe order and block size came out of the images, the volume was rebuilt from the copies, and the folder tree came back as it was.

98% read backBoth imaged first

Before you seal the box.

Get these done

  • Switch it off and leave it be
  • Say what it does: no light, a tick, a click
  • Post the unit whole if it is still sealed
  • Send the model number off the underside

What to avoid

  • Shaking it, or trying the freezer
  • Another twenty goes at a different cable
  • Running chkdsk, or letting the box rebuild
  • Copying whatever you rescue back onto it

Questions that come up most weeks.

The LaCie will not mount at all. Does that mean the disk has failed?

Usually not. On these the part that has given up is nearly always in front of the disk — the mains adapter, the bridge board that turns USB or Thunderbolt into SATA, or a socket that has been loose for a year. Nothing of that sort shows from outside the aluminium. So the mechanism leaves the case and goes on a bench port here. Two minutes later it has either answered or it has not. That is what tells us which half of the unit has failed. If it answers, the job is a plain copy, and a copy is charged at less than a recovery. Establishing that is what the free diagnosis is for, and the price is quoted afterwards.

Do you want the whole enclosure, or just the disk?

Send the whole unit, and the power supply with it. A LaCie is not built to be opened at the kitchen table — the Rugged is held shut by its bumper and clips, and on a d2 or a 2big the bridge board is bolted to the back. Where a model encrypts inside the enclosure, the bare mechanism reads as noise on any other port, so that board has to travel as well. If a disk has already come out of a two-bay box, mark which bay it sat in. Posting one of these whole costs very little more than posting it in pieces.

The 2big is set up as RAID 0 and one disk has gone.

Then the volume is striped, which is how a great many two-bay boxes leave the factory, and every large file has part of itself on each disk. Neither disk reads by itself, and neither should be reformatted or rebuilt onto. Send both, numbered by bay. Both are imaged before anything else, the stripe order and block size are worked out from those images, and the volume is put back together on our side. If one disk is truly beyond reading we say so at the diagnosis: what returns is whatever fell inside the surviving stripes.

LaCie belongs to Seagate now. Does that change anything?

Not for this work. Seagate bought LaCie years ago, and what sits inside the case has always been somebody else's mechanism in any event — LaCie built the enclosure, the bridge and the software wrapped around them. The disk in yours may carry any maker's label, and donor parts are matched to that mechanism rather than to the badge on the outside. Read us the model of the enclosure, and whatever is printed on the disk itself if the case is already open.

Pages people open after this.

Plug-in externals → The PC cannot see it → What the noise means → All the media we take →

A drive that stays switched off gets no worse.

The diagnosis is free, and it comes back as a list: which files read, which do not, and what getting them off would take. Until then, leave the drive unplugged.

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