My LaCie 320 GB Designed by Porsche unit has power and the system light is blinking oragne and red. The unit itself is not recognized by the computer after all cables are connected. I've tried replacing the fire wire cable and the battery supply with no change in my problem. Any suggestions?

SOURCE: bought a new LaCie drive; isn't recognized by mac or pc

Lacie Porsche drives in my experience or infamous for not having the most durable bridge boards. The bridge board is a chip that has a chipset on it which take the SATA or PATA connection and send it to the USB and or Firewire ports on the enclosure. If the drive is powered up, you should get a small red or orange light on the front. When connected to either mac or pc ( porsches are MS_DOS formatted out the box ), if it does not mount or does not appear in DISK UTILTY, then it is a high probability that the enclosure/bridge board has failed and the drive ( if not making grinding, buzzing, clicking or beeping sounds) will have to be extracted and placed into a more stable enclosure. Hope this helps.

SOURCE: Power light blinking orange/yellow. does not mount or recognise

i had the same problem on my lacie 500 gig. i went ahead and opened the lacie hd and put it in another external casing. and it worked. no data was lost. as for the problem i would guess that the lacie external casing circuts must of shorted.

SOURCE: Hard Drive 320 GBLacie Just worked once!!!

If connected by "Firewire" and is unplugged while on, may have controller damage. The harddrive in side may be seagate, and maybe they could help trouble shoot it?

SOURCE: LaCie F. A. Porsche Hard Drive

Try this...

use a long bladed kitchen knife to get carefully spread apart the sides from the bottom plate. there are 4 small tabs along each side of the case going int 4 slots on the bottom plate. The long sharp blade inserts easily between the side and bottom plate.
Carefully pry the side away from the bottom plate starting from the front working towards the back. You gently twist the blade to get the tabs out of the slots. the first one is the hardest. After that they pop out easy.
to remove the hard drive mechanism, once you have the bottom plate off, remove the four silver screws--two along each side--then use the knife to separate the sides of the hard drive from the case, so that the front of the drive is angled up (you'll also have to pull the activity LED loose from its hotmelt glue), then slide the drive out of its metal mounting bracket--you won't be able to pull the drive out along with this bracket.

SOURCE: power cord buzzes and MACPro does not recognize it

This is a fault in the power supply itself, I have just repaired one of these power supplies successfully.
The fault is caused by the failure of the filter capacitors on the 12V supply rail, and if the power supply is left connected to the mains supply (In our case 240V 50Hz) without the drive connected as a load, the unloaded output voltage will exceed the voltage rating of the capacitors, causing their failure. The failed capacitors had very obvious bulges at the top, and one was beginning to leak onto the PCB.

The filter capacitors on the 12V supply rail are rated at 16V, and the cpacitors on the 5V rail are rated at 10V, and when operated without a load, the 12V rail rises to approximately 19V, and the 5V rail rises to approximately 8V. All output filter capacitors are 1000uF, and 105deg C temperature rated.

I repaired my power supply by replacing all of the filter capacitors on the DC low voltage output rails with 1000uF 25V capacitors. Be careful to only fit the 105 deg C rated caps, as they operate at elevated temperatures in an enclosed environment with no ventillation to cool the power supply.
To ensure that the repair was reliable, I also replaced the filter capacitor on the 5V rail with the same 1000uF 25V, even though that capacitor showed no immediate signs of failure.

When reassembling the power supply, care must be taken to ensure that parts like the ferrite cored transformer are thermally bonded to the aluminium heatsink with a smear of heatsink compound.
When the power supply was first powered up following repair, everything was normal, the green power LED came on as usual, the supply outputs both came up OK, and the unit was not making any buzzing sounds, completely silent. The HDD now operated as normal when once again powered from this power supply.

This was the fix for my particular LaCie power supply model ACU057A-0512, and the supply once again works normally.


Tim,
Brisbane Australia.