Pet project: trying to resurrect 500 gb Lacie drive from logic board failure on one drive. Purchased and installed new logic board on broken drive and attempted to format via Disk Utility on OS X Mac. Instead of trying to get both 250's to work in the Lacie 500 right off, I thought I would initialize it in a 250 enclosure to be sure that it was working before running into other troubleshooting problems on the 500.

However, upon connecting with the G5, the disk spins up, and then the activity light blinks continuously forever. The diskutil does not recognize the drive, nor does Drive Genius or Disk warrior. I suspect that the new logic board is doing an automatic block/sector check but I just don't know.

There is a chance that the internals of the drive are fried as well, but I hear nothing unusual. I should mention that the logic board failed due to an incorrect power supply being connected to the Lacie drive. the logic board had a clearly visible burned component. The data recovery on it was 100% successful, and they told me it was simply a logic board failure -- thus this effort to inexpensively fix it.

Can anyone explain this blinking? Can this HDD only be initialized via UNIX?

thx Steve

The blinking is probably telling you that your enclosure is knackered.

Hook the drive up to the G5 directly and give that a shot.

If disk utility doesn't see it, neither will unix, disk utility as with all os x software runs on a Unix subsystem - if one can't see it the other won't.

I was advised to connect the HDD's via the ATA ribbon internally rather than via FW. Set it up on a G4, and the HDD with the new logic board needed to be initialized, which I did.

Then, I took the new Maxtor 250 and the revived Maxtor 250 and reinstalled them into the Lacie Big Disk 500gb enclosure [the new drive had already been initialized]. The drive mounted, but only appeared as a 250gb volume [the BDE has an internal HW RAID controller]. In Disk Utility, it appeared as a 500gb device, but only a 250gb volume. So I erased the device, then erased the volume, and it appeared as a 500gb device and volume.

Ran a block scan, OK! Fixed the drive with a $15 part!

steve