LaCie drive won't power. How to recover data?

I have a LaCie, 500Gb drive that I use for movies and photos. Tonight while working on an iMovie, I noticed that the edits were taking a long time, so I restarted my iMac. However, it would not restart, just showed a blank white screen for a very long time. Finally, after 20minutes, I hit the power button and shut it down. A powering on with the same button produced nothing but the white screen. I tried to boot from the installation disk, but it just kept asking me to select a startup disk. After about three tries, I got my Mac to boot itself. It came on fine, and 3 of my 4 external drives showed up, but not the 4th. System profiler called it an 'unknown device.' All the drives are Firewire, connected to each other and lastly to this LaCie drive, which is connected to my Mac.
The problem is that this LaCie drive will not power on. Its light comes on and blinks and the FIrewire connection allows the other drives to work, but this one remains unpowered. Various multiple attempts of restarting the computer do not help. I disconnected and reconnect the power supply, swapped it with another drive's power cored and it is not a problem with the cords. I swapped the Firewire connections as well, and it is not a problem with those since the other three drives work.
The real concern of mine is that this drive has my iPhoto Librairies and some iMovies that I was working on. Is ther any way to get it powered on enough to transfer my data to another drive or to my iMac?
If I have to use a drive recovery service will it be able to retrieve my iMovies intact? Will it be able to recover my iPhoto Libraries with my photos, albums and books intact or will I just be likely to get loose items?
I don't understand how the drive can suddenly be unable to power on without giving me some warning of its impending doom.
Any helpful support would be greatly appreciated. Yes, I have the iPhotoLibraries backed up except for some recent photo imports that I cannot recover since I deleted them from my camera. I was about to do some backups of my iMovies and photos tonight.....just when the drive failed.....I am not happy

Yes, I got a new drive with all my files on it. I think all the iMovies are intact, but I had three quicktime movie clips that were not completely recovered. Two of them are not important, but one is a slideshow that I have put into one of my iMovies. It plays only to about the halfway point. I have the entire thing on a DV tape, so I have just reimported it for the iMovie. I did call Drive Savers to complain about it, and they were very nice, will work on it again. I think they should, for the price!
They said it was 'just one of those things' that 'drives just fail sometimes' and I am sure they are correct. There was a mechanical problem with the arm that moves over the disks, and this drive had two disks, so the recovery process was more complicated. The guy said that the only thing that would have caused this that I would have done is drop it from a distance. Without having that, the drive just happened to fail. He said that some drives last 10 years; others fail a week after purchase. The half-life of most external hard drives is about 5 years. This one was about two years old...not even close. My other La Cie drive is at least two years older than that one, and it is trucking along perfectly.
The failed drive just did not give me any warning itself. However, I did notice a marked slowing with iMovie and long pauses with small edits. I had experienced those with iMovie 3 and 4, but not with 6--the one I am using nearly exclusively. So now, I will do backups on movies-in-progress, and I will be sure to back up anytime iMovie acts the way it did this time.
I have not yet checked my iPhoto Libraries. I do have backups for the photos....except for some from May?
Thanks for your support!

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I haven't done any conscious backup.
Time to start. Now. Using a computer without a back up is like driving without a seat belt. You'll be fine as long as nothing goes wrong, but if something does go wrong it'll be a much bigger mess.
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diakomacdiako wrote:
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Hi, Artiomike, and welcome to the Community!
Fortunately, there are other means to authenticate your ownership of the account; please see this information:
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Hi Kool G4. I think that I'll take a trip to Tek Serve tomorrow and see what they can do. I was hoping for the same luck I had with the internal one re-appearing, but so far nothing.
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Did you try using a powered USB hub?
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The external drive is a powered SATA, currently residing in a powered SATA to USB housing, no extensions. No, the drive is actually just not supported anymore and was not mountable before.
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I cannot recover anything with a Mac because the Mac will not read it. It is not supported due to something my friend did with his PC:
This is only since he had a go at recovery. Before then it was supported and appeared fine- just not mountable.
Obviously what happened is it took the MPEG portions of the Mac files as it understood that and discarded the rest.
Yes, I gathered that and explained as much to him. It discarded the entire 120GB FCPro project file I kind of would like to recover.
Not sure what now...
You had mentioned cloning/imaging etc. which you edited out. Could that be something which can be done with a PC (I am not a PC user but I guess I could have a go) and then I use said image on the Mac to copy the bits I need to transfer to the Mac-formatted storage device? Or- with a different Mac? Not sure why that would make a difference but I am happy to try anything!
Thank you to you both christopher rigby1 and ds store- means a lot not to be completely up the creek without a paddle. I just wish that I had not been overwhelmed by the offer of assistance from a PC user and had had more of a go myself. I suspect it would not be this difficult now.

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