I have dont some amazing projects for a small production company and i wanted to use them as a reel but the Lacie HD doesnt pop up on the screen and it only blinks we have tried a few computers but no luck. All we have now is a DVD put together but bringing it to the computer and recompressing will make the picture really bad.
Help!
what are my options?

Sorry to hear about your disk problems, a couple years ago I lost a firewire drive with 100MB of video which I needed for a dress rehearsal the next day; it's a terrible feeling.

In my case, Diskwarrior saved the day. It depends on what's wrong with the drive. If it's a hardware failure than no software package is going to help. But Diskwarrior is a good investment and you should probably have it in your toolkit anyway:

http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/

Other things to try: sounds like you've already covered some bases by trying it on different machines. Have you tried different firewire cables? How about different power supply bricks?

It's possible that some component in the power supply or interface has failed and the drive is OK. You could open up the box and remove the drive itself, then put it into an internal bay (if you have a G4 tower) or a different external enclosure.

As a last resort, there are companies which will do a surprisingly good job of recovering data from dead drives. This will probably be a very expensive option unfortunately. We used DriveSavers several years ago for a failed drive on one of our Macs at work. However, drives were much smaller then (this was a 2.4GB drive IIRC). They recovered just about everything, but it cost a little over $300. At that time you payed by the MB recovered. Unless their price structure has changed a lot (and it may have) this could get prohibitively expensive for video files. It's worth getting an estimate though if you've exhausted all other methods:

http://www.drivesavers.com/enterprise_solution/index.html

Good luck. Hopefully Diskwarrior is all you need.

Boyd- Do you know of anything similar for a PC? I have a bunch of video that was on a mirrored raid... that is, until someone formatted one of the drives for a system drive.

Sorry, I just don't do much with PC's. I know Norton has some of these capabilities. But Diskwarrior is pretty unique because all it does is rebuild hard drives - there aren't a lot of menu options or functions. But it does this one thing really well. I think it's sort of a must-have on the Mac. I sure would have gotten a lot more sleep that night if I'd had a copy handy :-) I was also pleasantly surprised to find an updater on their website recently which brought my two year old version up to the newest one.

Why not post a query in the PC forum here? I'll bet you'll get some suggestions for similar Windows products. If not then I'll ask our "IT guys" at work...

Just thought I would throw it out, since my problems are sort of similar to Dan's. I'm always running across killer apps, but then they turn out to be Mac software. I'm sure you have had the same thing happen.

I'm sure you have had the same thing happen.
That probably happens more often on the Mac than it does on the PC... can you say "dee-vee-rack"? ;-)

Can you say Final Cut Pro? hehehe

Keith:
Active Undelete should be able recover the data if someone quick formatted the drive.

If it's a full format (the one that takes a long time because it writes over the ENTIRE hard drive) then you're out of luck.

2- Dan:
If the data is important enough that you'd pay several hundred for data recovery, you may want to avoid messing with the hard drive. Some things can lower your chances of data recovery.

A- If the drive makes weird/horrible noises when you power it on, power it off right away. This may be a sign that the head is hitting the platters on the hard drive, which will kill data.

B- It should be fine to run DiskWarrior on the drive.

C- If the hard drive isn't spinning up (you can hear this, and the drive will make vibrations) then there are some DIY/do-it-yourself methods to try to recover the data (they are freezing the drive, or dropping the drive). This may/will lower the chances that a pro service will be able to recover your data.

See http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-1035_11-5029761.html

A pro service can take the platters out of the hard drive and install them into a working hard drive, so that can rescue data in many cases. Your drive may also be eligible for warranty after that (whereas with a DIY method, it wouldn't be).

Glen- That is somewhat impossible, since the nimrod in question installed Windows on that HDD. I took the other drive from the raid, and tried to rebuild the the data, but had no luck. I have since ceased any attempts, just in case the data is still on the second disk.

DiskWarrior saved my bacon several times...and it certainly paid for itself many times over.

Back in the old Mac OS 8/9 days, I wouldn't even DREAM of running a Mac without having a copy of DiskWarrior around; back then, Macs tended to corrupt their disk directories fairly often. Things have gotten much better with OSX, but I gotta say, I was really leery of running anything "mission critical" on OS X until DiskWarrior for OSX shipped.

Even today, I'd never run a Mac for work purposes without a copy of DiskWarrior available for it.