I'm asked from time to time about Lacie hard drive pcbs: sometimes a problem like an electrical short will damage the hard drive's PCB and the common thinking is that a simple PCB changed should suffice, rather than sending the whole drive off for repair. This common knowledge is wrong - 10 years or so ago it was possible to swapping hard drive controllers boards or pcb's and the drive would work normally again, nowadays this is something that doesn't happen. This is because the information now on the hard drive's pcb contains unique data to the drive it is housed on, so changing the controller board - swapping a broken on with a working one will no longer work.
For all types of
Lacie hard drive problem, contact Lacie or Data Clinic at
http://www.dataclinic.co.uk, even controller board problems. If you drop your Lacie hard drive and the drive then begins to beep or tick then it's important you dont switch the hard drive on any more - this is because the noise your are hearing in the hard drive trying to start, but the platters inside the hard drive are being impeded, probably by the heads that read and write the data or by the spindle, which has developed a fault. Mechanical problems like this are best handled by data recovery specialists such as Data Clinic who will be able to assess the situation and restore the data from the hard drive without sustaining any further damage.
