Hi,
After reading many forums and experiences, I have come to what I think is the best option available. By now I have no doubts that the defects concern a failure of the hard drive material (poor quality) and is a come theme among, as far as I know, all LaCie drives (I am owner of various products of this brand - and on my way out of these firm).
So, for you souls to happened to be stuck and the only thing you want for now is to recover your valuable data, let's focus on that and once achieve, please get yourself another drive for pretty much any other brand available except this LaCie B-S!
1. Control Panel
2. Administrative Tools
3. Computer Management
4. Storage - Disk Management
5. Select your LaCie hard drive from the bottom half of the pane (probably Disk 1)
6. Right click, Properties 'Change drive letters and paths', and add a letter, e.g. K
7. Download HandyRecovery tool: www.handyrecovery.com
8. Let the program scan for the LaCie hard drive.
The main point here is that once a letter is added, you will be able to see LaCie drive K for instance, in Windows Explorer, but you will notice it is empty, no contents.
The trick is that at least it shows as a drive in Windows, which is exactly what HandyRecovery needs to initiate the scanning of the drive's surface.
On my experience, I was able to recover 100% of the data, since I took immediate action (avoiding sectors been overwritten).
Worst case scenario, you will not be able to recover any file but at least you will see a full directory tree view of the drive, full list of files, directories and its contents, i.e. a visual snapshot of the drive.
That's it. Hope you will find this useful.
Sergio (London, UK)