I have an older Lacie 250gb USB 2.0 hard drive and can not read my photos files on windows 7. How can I open/retrieve my old photos?

The BKF file is only a reference to allow the XP os to know what program opens which file. It doesn't contain photos or music or documents.

Inside the LaCie D2 250GB (300770) external harddrive's case, is a 250GB IDE (PATA) harddrive that is 3.5 inches across in width.

A desktop computer sized harddrive. (May be a Western Digital WD25000JB)

The harddrive plugs into a small circuit board, (Bridge board), and the circuit board has a USB port on it.

Using this Western Digital Passport for an example,

http://www.xbitlabs.com/misc/picture/?src=/images/storage/wd-passport-250gb/p3.jpg&1=1

Scroll down to the second photo, and left-click on it. The case of the external harddrive is shown open.
Inside is a 2.5 inch laptop sized harddrive.
An aluminum tape strip covers the small circuit board, attached at the back of the harddrive.

The second photo down on this page, shows you the small interface circuit board, that the harddrive plugs into, with the aluminum tape removed.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/wd-passport-250gb_2.html

(Another design has wires coming from the small circuit board, to an interface the harddrive plugs into )

It is this small circuit board that goes bad in a LaCie. QUITE common.

Solution?

Simple.
1) Obtain a 3.5 inch IDE external enclosure
2) Remove the 3.5 IDE harddrive from the LaCie's case.
3) Install the harddrive out of the LaCie into the external 3.5 IDE enclosure.

An example of a 3.5 IDE (PATA) external enclosure,

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1733195&CatId=2779

For additional questions please post in a Comment.
Regards,
joecoolvette

hi.
maybe problem is caused by your Power supply.
so i recommend you to do these:
1- remove the main hard drive and only connect "250GB lacie porsche hard drive".
and see is it recognized or not.
2- go to the bios (with pressing "delete key" at start of turning on) and navigate to power center.
then enable power saving mode.

Did you check the MS hardware compatability list http://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/windows-7/en-us/default.aspx

The native file system for Macs is HFS. If the drive was originally used with a Mac, the current file system on the drive is HFS. Windows uses NTFS and is not compatible with HFS; which is why Windows doesn't recognize the drive as valid.

You can download a data retrieval tool called MacDrive that will give Windows the ability to speak Mac. There is a free trial available and it should be able to help you grab the files off of the drive.

If you're using the MS Backup utility, it's creating .BKF files which are very large (1-2GB+). Your external hard drive uses a FAT32 file system, which has a limitation of 4GB per file. If your backup files are over 4GB, it won't copy. It probably worked on your 250GB hard drive because it was formated with NTFS and not FAT32. You'll need to limit the size of your backup files to 4GB or less, or use a different utility that has file-size splitting options.

I think the migration assistant (in the utilities file in your application folder) can transfer files direct via USB.

Some PC's cannot deliver enough power to the USB devices to function properly through the USB port.
Does your Lacie hard disk have a power input connector if so conect a power adapter to it before you put it into your USB port.

Another alternative, get a powered USB hub connect it into your computer then connect the Lacie hard drive to the powered USB hub.

This is a pretty old thread, but I just figured out the work-around for my Lacie drive with the same symptoms. I took the Lacie case apart to find a pretty standard 3.5" Seagate Barracuda drive inside the case. If you pull the actual hard drive out of the box, you can either purchase a new external hard drive adapter box ($30-80) or install it into a tower computer. I installed it into an older G3 tower and it mounted right up. I decided it wasn't worth investing in a six year old hard drive, so I will be purchasing a new drive and pulling the data off the old one.

Are you trying to create one giant zip file or something similar? It sounds as if your Lacie 250gb hard drive has been formatted with a FAT32 filesystem and you are running into the maximum file size limit of 4gb minus 1 byte. Try just copying your files without using any compression utility or try reformatting your Lacie 250gb hard drive with the NTFS filesystem instead.