Initializing help...

[roboman]

We had some problems with a Lacie 500 gb Big Disk Extreme HD not recognizing through the Firewire 400 port. We have some very important football game videos on this hdd that we need to retrieve. I was asked if I could look at it and see what the problem could be. Well as some of you know this drive actually has 2 hdds installed into the case and is just utilizing a Raid 0 controller card on the case. Well the first thing I wanted to test was the hard drives themselves. I took out the primary hard drive and wanted to see if it would recognize in my Windows machine. It recognized and wanted to initialize. Stupid me I initialize it but without formatting it. I know better than this because I work in the Information Technology field. After testing the secondary partition and finding out it worked (I didnt now initialize it) I put everything back in the case. Today I was thinking maybe it was the firewire port. So I used the Firewire 800 port and it will recognize in OS X but it states it cannot read it and it wants to initialize the disk. So this tells me the Firewire 400 is bad. Yes I was stupid in initializing it in Windows and I feel stupid for doing that.

 

Now my question is how do I get it to initialize without erasing the data so we can retrieve the data from the hd? I got a quote for $3500 to send it to a disk recovery service but that is out of the question.

 

I do appreciate any and all comments.

 

Thanks

 

PowerBook G4 OS X 10.3.9

 

I am thinking that I will need some kind of software to retrieve the data without initializing. I found this one so far and testing it out:

 

http://www.macintosh-data-recovery.com/

 

It is scanning at the moment so if it sees the 3 folders I need WHOA!!! I will post back here and if you know of another way please comment.

[roboman]

Purchased Data Rescue II and it works like a charm. Recovering the files as I type. I chose this one because it was only $99....