Khan
Gone but not forgotten
- Joined
- Aug 23, 2006
- Messages
- 6,924
My external hard drive seems to have died (it's not showing on the PC). Is there anything to be done?
LaCie
LaCie
My external hard drive seems to have died (it's not showing on the PC). Is there anything to be done?
LaCie
Also, if there is important data you do not wish to lose, you can take it to someone who can try and get the data off the drive... but I think it cost some money to do this....
I recently had similar symptoms after moving some things around. My externals didn't like the hub that I plugged them into and will only work when connected via a port on a USB card attached to the motherboard. They worked for a while after I switched them to the hub, and then began to disappear about a week apart. Back on the USB card now and no problems.
This is weird.
I plug both of the external hard drive USB plugs directly into the PC and it shows up just fine.
Why did it work OK on a hub for months and then disappear; and now shows up OK on direct plug in?
That was probably my case. Brand new powered hub with 4 external HD's. The two that "failed" are now on the card and two are on the hub and they are all working fine. Too little juice or too much trying to go through the hub, whatever the case, there are definitely limitations to what you can do with a hub.Either something broke or you were on the fine line of some tolerance level and dropped below it.
4 external HD's
Could be a couple of things.
Some devices count on some power from the USB end of things and sometimes that croaks in a hub without affecting a fair number of devices that dont count on any of the USB power signals. Most USB hubs carry both the USB signals and some DC power thats sufficient to power many small devices...some regenerate the signals.
Other devices are very sensitive to being used on a hub or on the effective cable distance, which includes wiring and the hub itself, which electrically appears as an extra piece of cable. Some units specifically note they're not to be used on a hub or only with a cable up to xx feet long. If you use two long USB cables AND a non regenerating hub...well...you're on the edge of the spec for the device.
In general I wouldnt recommend attaching a high volume device like a hard drive or memory card reader to a hub. Those are better for mice, digital cameras, low res USB webcams and the like.
Khan...did the hub have a power supply or was it an unpowered one? The power supply on the hub might have failed, which wouldnt have affected a lot of regular devices but might have affected signal regeneration or USB power dependence.
Either something broke or you were on the fine line of some tolerance level and dropped below it.
It's all evidence - I swear.Dude! Thats a lot of porn!!!
I've got the same setup, plus two on the front panel connected to the expansion card via an internal cable. I went the hub route because after updating the firmware on my MP3 player it didn't work right on the front panel USB ports. Other users on a different forum posted that the first fix to try was to connect via a port on the motherboard. There was some other gizmo (the cordless phones I think) that occasionally have to be plugged in, but will only work on the USB ports on the big board. I dug an extra USB expansion card out of my junk box only to find thanks to ginormous video card I can't use my available expansion slot. The hub, actually two hubs (they were cheap) was an experiment to try and do a workaround on the port issues without resorting to getting behind the machine and rewiring half of the peripheral connections every time I wanted to add some music to my MP3 player.Never had a lot of luck with external hubs. Always some sort of glitch or other. Ended up sticking a $12 board inside the machine with 4 ports onboard and a daughter card with 4 more.
a non regenerating hub...
Never had a lot of luck with external hubs. Always some sort of glitch or other.
...
Worst time i had was with an iMac with a hub on it as I had one more USB device than the iMac had ports. Never worked right. Ended up giving up on one of the devices so I could go without the hub.
Man, I don't know what it is with you and Macs. I have external hubs on all my macs, for years - never a problem. Even the old 2000 graphite iMac that the kid uses everyday.
-ERD50
You know what they say, there are those people who do backups and those who haven't had a disk failure.
I don't understand all this crap.
How do I know if it was power supply?
It worked, then it didn't; with no change I was aware of.
I thought (mistakenly ?) that I could link up several layers of USB hubs.
This reminds me of owning my MG in the '70s: every morning was an adventure re starting.
I see ERD50's lips are flapping, but I have his volume to zero. I'm gonna guess he's saying it'd be great with a mac. If you put the same hub and the same drive on a mac, you'd have had the same problem. This is quite unlikely to be operating system related.
I don't understand all this crap.
How do I know if it was power supply?