Hi first post here. Just needed some clarity as have been getting different reports. My external drive recently packed it in. It was a LACIE 1tb (enclosed with two separate 500GB IDE Barracuda drives.) I bought an enclosure and the first instruction i get for both when I connect it to my MAC, gives me the option to INITIALIZE, IGNORE or EJECT. If I initialize the drive will that make it impossible to retrieve my data? Should I hit ignore then run a DATA retrieval app? Thx in advance....
I believe the Lacie drive uses both drives in a RAID 0 configuration. If I am correct, you cannot just put the individual drives in another enclosure.
Assuming that both HDDs are OK (and the enclosure is broken)... then you would need to put them in a a new Lacie enclosure. If either of the HDDs is broken... then you would have lost your data.
If on the other hand... Lacie uses JBOD or Spanning... then it is possible that you have 1/2 of your data even if one HDD failed (and not the enclosure).
In any case... I would probably restore from backup rather than trying to fix the broken drive(s).
To directly answer your question. Do NOT initialize.
/Jim