Need help reviving an external drive.

[Ryan1524]

I think my 1TB external HDD that's about 99% full just decided to went kaputski. Close to half of that amount is irreplacable. Any suggestions on how to revive it - even temporarily would be good.

I've gone through a dozen power cycles, orienting the drives differently, setting it next to my window for 10 minutes (it's -6 outside), and a different cable. Nothing. My Disk Utility (on a mac) recognizes something plugged in, but can't read any properties of the drive. It can't even tell its SMART status, size, etc. But it does show the drive there. I jsut can't access it, or do anything to it.

I really need help. Anyone, please?

 

[Fuzzbear]

I think my 1TB external HDD that's about 99% full just decided to went kaputski. Close to half of that amount is irreplacable. Any suggestions on how to revive it - even temporarily would be good.

I've gone through a dozen power cycles, orienting the drives differently, setting it next to my window for 10 minutes (it's -6 outside), and a different cable. Nothing. My Disk Utility (on a mac) recognizes something plugged in, but can't read any properties of the drive. It can't even tell its SMART status, size, etc. But it does show the drive there. I jsut can't access it, or do anything to it.

I really need help. Anyone, please?

do you have another enclosure you can try? Could you take the drive out and put it in a computer to see if you can get anything off it? sometimes the enclosure itself goes south.

Other than that im not exactly sure what you can do, I know there are disaster recovery places that will actually take the drive a part and pull data off the platters themselves but this is usually mucho $$$$$

 

[Ryan1524]

The drive is from OWC, and it's still under the 2 yr warranty. It's a huge drive with 2 500GB in it. You might be right, but even if I void the warranty and pull the two drives apart, it's actually a Raid 1 Stripe, and I'm not that familiar with RAID. Can I jsut put it on another RAID controller to get it to work? I knew this Striping business was gonna come back and bite me in the a$$. Should've gone with RAID 0 or RAID 10.

Either way, I'd much rather not have to break the warranty just yet.

 

[Fuzzbear]

The drive is from OWC, and it's still under the 2 yr warranty. It's a huge drive with 2 500GB in it. You might be right, but even if I void the warranty and pull the two drives apart, it's actually a Raid 1 Stripe, and I'm not that familiar with RAID. Can I jsut put it on another RAID controller to get it to work? I knew this Striping business was gonna come back and bite me in the a$$. Should've gone with RAID 0 or RAID 10.

Either way, I'd much rather not have to break the warranty just yet.

Im not familiar enough with raid to answer that myself. Does the enclosure have some sort of seal on it? I understand your reservations Warranty wise... Doubt that warranty extends to your data though

 

[itickings]

The drive is from OWC, and it's still under the 2 yr warranty. It's a huge drive with 2 500GB in it. You might be right, but even if I void the warranty and pull the two drives apart, it's actually a Raid 1 Stripe, and I'm not that familiar with RAID. Can I jsut put it on another RAID controller to get it to work? I knew this Striping business was gonna come back and bite me in the a$$. Should've gone with RAID 0 or RAID 10.

Either way, I'd much rather not have to break the warranty just yet.

Well, if the data is important I couldn't care less about the warranty part. (But it wouldn't hurt to contact OWC about the issue first to hear about their policy or get recommendations on how to proceed)

Regarding RAID, to get the levels straight:
RAID0=striped drives (2x500=1000)=lose all data if one drive dies.
RAID1=mirrored drives (2x500=500)=same data on both drives.

Anyway - Most likely either one of the drives or the enclosure itself has gone bad. If it is the enclosure, the data is probably recoverable. If one of the drives died and the data was striped, well, the data recovery ranges from "difficult" through "expensive" to "impossible".

Either way, you probably have to open it up and extract the drives in order to recover anything or even determine what's wrong with it.

 

[Ryan1524]

Yes, sorry, I always confuse the two RAID #'s. Hm, yea, that's what I figured. An update, when I turn on the enclosure, theere's the first beep that normally is followed by some read sounds and the whole thing mounts. Now it just kept on cycling the beep sounds (the tone is slightly different), so i'm thinking they came from the different drives individually in sequence?

 

[aross99]

Definately call OWC and see if you can get a replacement enclosure, or if they can tell you what the beeps mean. I think that is your best bet.

After that you are getting into a grey area...

I don't know enough about how the drives are "raided" together. If they are striped in a Raid 0 (as it sounds like they are), then one isn't any good without the other. If they are mirrored as in a Raid 1, then one might be usable without the other, but that depends alot on how it was setup, and if it was a hardware or software raid, etc.

Like I said, kind of a can of worms w/o the same enclosure...