Lacie 4TB Thunderbolt hard drive volume not visible

[theoldyellow]

I just purchased one of Lacie's 4TB Rugged thunderbolt external hard drives. It's being used as RAID 0 and I immediately reformatted it to one ExFat partition to make it compatible with both mac & windows. I'm on Yosemite 10.10.3 with a 2014 MBR 15.4''.

Yesterday I transferred 1.6TB of data into it from another drive. Everything was fine until the next time I plugged it in to my macbook. The hard drive shows up on disk utility but the volume (OLDYELLOW) is greyed out and renamed as "disk2s2". I can verify and repair the hard drive and disk utility says everything is fine but I can't repair the volume. I get error messages "invalid sector size: 0" "File system check exit code is 8". Reformatting the hard drive is not an option.

I tried DiskWarrior 5 but it will not allow me to rebuild the volume but says the hard drive is functioning properly. The only program that allows me to access the volume is Seagate File Recovery. I can see the volume with it's proper name (OLDYELLOW) and I can access every single file inside but I don't want to pay $100 unless it's my last option. I'm hoping someone has a fix for this issue because I need the video files inside the hard drive for a project. Thanks.

 

[G-nius]

Since there are no replies I'll try to at least suggest something:

1) if you want to recover something off the drive, make sure to make absolutely no changes to the drives. No writes whatsoever.

2) You could try making a disk clone with dd to a 4TB disk (you might also check out ddrescue using a linux live cd) or image on that disk. No idea to do that with a RAID 0 but maybe it will work since the volume is still recognized in Disk Utility.
Then use testdisk on the resulting image. It's a free program that I've used succesfully in the past to recover data from deleted partitions, no soft RAIDs though so no idea how it will handle those. It will require a lot of time and effort with no guarantee of success. You could also just pay the 100 bucks (if you haven't already).

3) Clearly it hasn't been plastered all over the web for like a gazillion + 1 times already: RAID =/= back-up and don't use RAID 0 for files you can't afford to lose. But that's a lesson you've learnt already ...

 

[bilibop]

Hello theoldyellow,

I just created an account to reply to you as this happened to me this morning as well. I was able to repair the disk using fsck_exfat as described in this post
http://www.tonymacx86.com/lion-desktop-support/60281-all-sudden-hdd-not-readable.html

Simply run the following command from the terminal in mac OS

sudo fsck_exfat -d /dev/rdisk2s2

Make sure the drive was again identified as disk2s2 either in Disk Utility or using the command

diskutil info

fsck may ask you if you want to update the boot sector, answer yes and with some luck it will repair your disk. If it exits successfully, run the following command to mount the disk

diskutil mount disk2s2

I hope it works for you too !