2 dead terabyte external hds - data recovery?

[faroukabad]

I have a dead La Cie Big disk terabyte external drive. It won't mount and it isn't recoverable the way it is. So I looked inside, it's 2 x 500 gig Seagate drives.

So, I took the 2 drives out and installed one of them in a Mac Pro to see if it would mount on it's own. I figured probably not, since there were two drives mounted in this La Cie external case, they must have been RAID-ed together. I don't really know much about RAID, obviously.

Disk utility saw the disk, but it wouldn't mount and gave the unreadable message. Tried to disk utility it, and it gave file system errors, not surprised. It looks like you can't separate them, the RAID must split the files onto the two disks.

Is there any point to trying the utility Data Recovery on it? Or should I just tell my boss the only way to get the data back is to send it out to a data recovery place? I don't want to try and reformat them if there is still any possible way to get the data off them. I think the drives are fine and would work as a terabyte drive in the Fantom case if reformatted, but then we lose all these important projects.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

We seem to have the worst luck with external hard drives.

The odd thing is that I have another dead terabyte drive, a Fantom drive in which one of the 500 gig drives started clicking. I took both 500 gig WD drives out of the Fantom case and installed the two Seagate 500s from the dead La Cie case. It shows up in Disk Utility as an unformatted 1T drive. I was hoping it might just reconstitute itself in another case, but no go. If worse comes to worse, I will reformat it and it will probably be useable.

 

[AppleNewton]

have you tried putting themboth in the macpro at once, maybe see if it sees them together? I havent messed around much with raided drives in that manner before.

the raid set up initially for the drives could have been broke from the getgo.
maybe try different cables to connect the drive possibly?

 

[quantum003]

Ugh... shouldn't have opened it. Voided the warranty. I thought RAID simply creates duplicate information on two drives for redundant backup. Try working on just one at a time. Might want to get one of those $20 USB to IDE/SATA converter devices. Those are simple, quick, and cheap, and they work.

Don't send the drives away, you can buy a data recovery program for $50... you could recover your bosses data for $70 total and be a hero. If you can get one of the drives to mount, download a "trial" version of a data recovery program. It will show you what it *can* recover. Then you can choose to upgrade if you see your files in the "recoverable" list.

This is another situation that Disk Warrior would be able to help with as well. (No I don't work for Alsoft. The program just rocks).

 

[Tomorrow]

RAID0 "stripes" the data, putting some data on one disk and the rest of the data on the other. It provides performance with no redundancy.

RAID1 "mirrors" the data, so that each disk contains all the data independently of the other disk. It provides redundancy with no performance benefit.

If you were using RAID1, the data should still be there, assuming the disk is not individually corrupted. If you were using RAID0, you're gonna need both disks to recover the data.

 

[quantum003]

RAID0 "stripes" the data, putting some data on one disk and the rest of the data on the other. It provides performance with no redundancy.

RAID1 "mirrors" the data, so that each disk contains all the data independently of the other disk. It provides redundancy with no performance benefit.

If you were using RAID1, the data should still be there, assuming the disk is not individually corrupted. If you were using RAID0, you're gonna need both disks to recover the data.

Thanks for the info. Nice post.

 

[Transporteur]

If you were using RAID0, you're gonna need both disks to recover the data.

As he is talking about terabyte drives, the two 500GB drives were probably running in a striped array, which makes recovery almost impossible.
The best chance to get the RAID0 running again is to connect both drives to the exact same controller (which in case of an external enclosure is inside the enclosure), and even then, the chance of getting a fully working array is pretty low as the controllers inside such boxes are fake RAID controllers.
RAID0s (especially non-hardware RAIDs which we are talking about here) are pretty bitchy if they have been destroyed.

Trying the get the array running inside the Mac Pro is not worth the time, it simply won't work.
To setup a RAID0 in the Pro, the associated drives have to be formatted, so no chance for recovery the old data.

 

[Tomorrow]

As he is talking about terabyte drives, the two 500GB drives were probably running in a striped array, which makes recovery almost impossible.

Getting off-topic, that's one reason to forgo a striped array in favor of a larger, faster drive.

RAID1 is a godsend in the event of a drive failure - I restored one earlier this week - but in my experience, RAID0 isn't worth much.

 

[Transporteur]

...but in my experience, RAID0 isn't worth much.

It's definitely not worth it if you don't have a serious backup solution as the failure rate is twice (in case of two drives) as high as of a single drive.