LaCie FireWire drive usage tips
Feb 12, '02 09:31:43AM
Contributed by: chardinej
After experiencing a hard drive crash of my LaCie external 80 gig Firewire drive today, I can advise on how to avoid this based on what I learned from LaCie tech support:
- Don't use the drive out of the box in Mac OS X. It will work and appear to be fine, BUT it is formatted with Silverlining "which is incompatible with OS X".
- To prepare the drive first boot from the LaCie CD supplied with the drive and run Silverlining Pro.
- Check that the ATA-Firewire bridge firmware is the latest version (currently 3.12; mine was 3.11, which puzzled the tech support as drives should be shipped with the version provided on the CD. Update firmware if needed.
- Boot back into X and partition/reformat the drive using the Apple hard drive software supplied with X.
The good news is that Disk Warrior was able to rebuild the volume information on the drive with no loss of infomation and I was able to remount and backup files.
The bad news is that none of this would have occurred if LaCie had included some warnings and instructions with the drive.
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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020212093143562