Lost my external hard drive again.

Hello,

Lost my 3 TB external hard drive once again!

One of my external hard drives has disappeared, by that I mean it no longer shows up with my other external hard drives when I double click on the Computer icon on my desktop.

Besides “losing” the drive, I also am having problems formatting it.

Problem 1: My missing drive.

This is the drive that I perform my system backups to.

If I power the drive off and back on, I hear the “ding” sounds that occur when it disconnects and connects.

The drive having an issue is a LaCie 3TB external drive. I use an eSATA connection between external drive and my PC.
Even if I connect the drive via USB2, the drive is missing.

When I right click on Computer icon, select Manage a then Disk Management my missing drive appears but I have to initialize it first:

Please refer to attach files - Capture 1.JPG
Note: This use to be a usable drive, my system backups were written here. I also kept a copy of the pictures on this drive.

I do not know whether my lost drive problem is related to Windows 7, Dell or my LaCie drive.

Maybe unrelated, but I do suffer from time to time machine crashes or system stalls that require me to power off and on my machine, but I have not lost my drive.
I have not figured out a pattern yet. My last “lost” drive was noticed on 04/07/13. Previous problem was discovered on 06/08/12.

Since I have encountered this problem a couple of times, I always check that my backup was successful. I backup my system weekly.

Once I format my drive, it re-appears again, but at the loss of any data on the drive. The problem is my drive has gone missing several times now. Any backup data or any others files on it are lost.

My machine is a DELL Studio XPS Desktop 8100, running Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1 with current maintenance. The drive that I am having the problem with is a 3TB LaCie d2 Quadra v2.1.

Problem 2: Formatting my lost drive.

The instructions that I use to format the drive I received from LaCie.

1. Start by executing RUN and typing cmd.
2. From DOS prompt, I enter diskpart
3. From the new window, I enter "list disk":

Please refer to attach files - Capture 2.JPG
In order to verify that I am working with the correct drive, I turn off the drive and issue “list disk” again, “Disk 1” disappears. Turn the drive back on and issue “list disk” again.
This confirms that “Disk 1” is my 3TB drive.

Note: The Size and Free values show the drive as 746 GB. My 3TB should have a larger value.

4. I then enter “select disk 1”

The screen shows “Disk 1 is now the selected disk”

5. I next enter the command “clean”

The screen shows “DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk”

6. Close out the “DiskPart” windows.

7. From the DOS window enter “diskmgmt.msc”

The following appears:

Please refer to attach files - Capture 3.JPG

I select GPT and press “OK”

The following appears:

Please refer to attach files - Capture 4.JPG

As you can see from the screen above, my 3TB drive shows up as 746.39 GB. Via diskpart, the Size/Free values are both 746 GB

When I connect my external drive to my laptop via a USB2 connection, only option I have, and perform both the diskpart and diskmgmt.msc commands, the results are different.

On the laptop via diskpart, both the Size/Free values are both 2794 GB. On the laptop via diskmgmt.msc, drive shows as 2794.38 GB Unallocated

The laptop is a DELL 1545 running Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1 with current maintenance.

After I format the drive on my laptop, I can successfully connect my newly formatted drive to my desktop, the drive show as 2.72TB:

Please refer to attach files - Capture 5.JPG
I am looking to resolve the problems of the “lost” drive as well as the desktop not being able to format the 3TB drive correctly.

Does anyone have any suggestions/ resolutions or questions regarding my problems?

Thanks

Stu

Hello,

Thanks for your reply. I will take a look at the product.

Hello,

I would like to thank ICit2lol once again for taking the time to response to my thread, but I am still looking for the reason for my external drive being "lost".

Since this is the drive that I create my backups on, I would like to depend upon it being there with my backups on it.

Thanks

Stu

Someone reviewing a LaCie 3TB external drive on newegg mentioned only able to get it working properly with a USB 2.0 cable, plus company gave them the run around about it (no telling what that really means).

Sadly the only review there:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822154545

That was only model with eSata listed.

I'd put that on another computer and see if that one has the same flaky problems.

I discovered that 7 couldn't handle two of the exact same external drives connected via USB at the same time, but not issue here.

Hello and thanks to all who have comments and replied.

I have switch my backup to a WD external cloud drive and so far my backups are working.

I am going to mark this as resolved.

Thanks

Stu

what to do if external hdd not show up in Partition Wizard??? disk management show only "unknown" and "not initialized"