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LaCie BigDisk died on me...


non sequitur
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I had a 500gb (two striped 250gig drives) lacie bigdisk die on me in late december. since they only had a 1 year warranty for my model, i was SOL with repairs. doing some research and things of that sort, i found out that it was only the raid controller inside that died, not the disks. The disks are alive and well. The only problem is that they were striped (RAID 0), and without the raid controller/ a pc with a raid compatible mobo, i cant access the data. they wont sell me a new enclosure.

 

So basically, i need to get an enclosure that supports RAID 0 striping. does anyone have any suggestions? I'm looking around and seeing nothing, and i dont have a backup backup drive. i basically need to fix this problem asap and back up my machine. anyone know what to do/where to find a good enclosure?

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Non Seq, am I understanding you correctly that you want to try and recover the data by placing the remaining live disk into a RAID 0 array? If this is your goal, regretfully it will not succeed. By using a system that uses RAID 0 (NO idea why they all come preconfigured for RAID 0 instead of RAID 1) it means that if ANY disk fails, you will lose all of your data.

 

Qbattersby has offered a good solution, get a Drobo - it's a great system, and if you want to network attach the Drobo, you can do so using the DroboShare. It doesn't use RAID 0, it uses its own proprietary protection to ensure protection from a drive failure. If you go to Drobo.com there is a video - must see TV, so to speak.

 

Anyway - sorry about the drive failure, you aren't alone. Check out the Drobo, it's a great solution.

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EddieZ - from what I understand of the OP - it was the controller, not the disks, that failed -s o the data is still there - hopefully just hooking the disks up to another raid controller will allow him to get the data off

 

non seq: best bet is to take it to your local computer shop, explain your problem, hopefully they'll have something setup to help you access the data

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  • 2 weeks later...

Yeah we had two of those fail at work. After chatting with an unusually frank tech support guy I've decided to never, ever, ever, ever use lacie for anythig important, ever again. (did I stress ever enough there?)

Once our second big disk went down, and we got our quote for a few thousand dollars to fix it from some drive repair place, I called lacie and asked if it were feasable to plug the drives into a working big disk enclosure.

Here's what he told me: maybe, but probably not. The ONLY chance you have is if the dead enclosure and the new enclosure are very close in serial numbers, and even the it's a {censored} shoot. Apparantly lacie's hardware and raid controllers changes every few hundered, give or take, units. It comes down to lowest bidder when they need parts, so the chances of having two identical raid controllers was slim.

 

( by chance I found another enclosure that was working, only 11 numbers away, and tried drive swappinng... but no dice)

 

Also, in talking with my local pc shop, they didn't seem too hopefull that any data would be recovered using a software raid, and since a hardware raid is out of the question unless you can find identical hardware... I gave up.

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  • 5 months later...

*** just for people landing here searching for a solution to this problem

 

I managed to gain access to ALL data (files, music, movies, etc.) from a completely dead lacie bigdisk 500 gb case, with 2 Raid 0 250 gb disks inside.

 

It works ! I just finished copying 240 Gb from the "unmountable" lacie bigdisk 500 to a newly bought 500 gb usb drive.

 

It will work IF both hard drives are physically ok. If one of them is physically dead, sorry, you have lost your data.

 

Here is how I did it :

  • 1. open the case [it void the warranty]
  • 2. remove the 2 disks
  • 3. connect them both in a PC (desktop with 2 free 3.5 IDE connectors), on IDE cable (with jumpers properly configured)
  • 4. boot the pc [iF windows asks to initialise newly connected disks DO NOT D O IT]
  • 5. find the following 2 softwares : http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm AND http://www.runtime.org/captain-nemo.htm
  • 6. watch this :
    (or search for "raid reconstructor tutorial" on youtube. This video explained me exactly how to get it back to life, as the soft is not completely trivial.
  • 7. open raid reconstructor
  • 8. select both hard drives
  • 9. "open disks"
  • 10. analyse
  • 11. put 5000000 in sector to analyse (instead of 100000 wich is not enough)
  • 12. if there is a clear suggestion, select proper settings
  • 13. back to main screen
  • 14. create a VIM virtual image, and save it somewhere on your PC (ex : in my documents)
  • 15. open "captain nemo"
  • 16. click on "image", sleect the .vim file just created before
  • 17. Voilà ! you have access to your data !

Good Luck if you are trying to get back part of your electronic life...

 

One important reminder : Do NEVER use Raid 0 hard drives to store/backup any data. It is ONLY useful for performance. Not for safety. Raid 1, n is of course ok.

 

Jack

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  • 4 weeks later...

I've been trying to do this for ages, yet it can never recognize the disk order or the sector size or whatever is it. Could it be because my drive is formatted in HFS?

 

If anyone has software tips that would be awesome, or if someone at least has what the size is so that I can just play around with the drive order and hopefully get what I need.

 

Thanks in advance

*** just for people landing here searching for a solution to this problem

 

I managed to gain access to ALL data (files, music, movies, etc.) from a completely dead lacie bigdisk 500 gb case, with 2 Raid 0 250 gb disks inside.

 

It works ! I just finished copying 240 Gb from the "unmountable" lacie bigdisk 500 to a newly bought 500 gb usb drive.

 

It will work IF both hard drives are physically ok. If one of them is physically dead, sorry, you have lost your data.

 

Here is how I did it :

  • 1. open the case [it void the warranty]
  • 2. remove the 2 disks
  • 3. connect them both in a PC (desktop with 2 free 3.5 IDE connectors), on IDE cable (with jumpers properly configured)
  • 4. boot the pc [iF windows asks to initialise newly connected disks DO NOT D O IT]
  • 5. find the following 2 softwares : http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm AND http://www.runtime.org/captain-nemo.htm
  • 6. watch this :
    (or search for "raid reconstructor tutorial" on youtube. This video explained me exactly how to get it back to life, as the soft is not completely trivial.
  • 7. open raid reconstructor
  • 8. select both hard drives
  • 9. "open disks"
  • 10. analyse
  • 11. put 5000000 in sector to analyse (instead of 100000 wich is not enough)
  • 12. if there is a clear suggestion, select proper settings
  • 13. back to main screen
  • 14. create a VIM virtual image, and save it somewhere on your PC (ex : in my documents)
  • 15. open "captain nemo"
  • 16. click on "image", sleect the .vim file just created before
  • 17. Voilà ! you have access to your data !

Good Luck if you are trying to get back part of your electronic life...

 

One important reminder : Do NEVER use Raid 0 hard drives to store/backup any data. It is ONLY useful for performance. Not for safety. Raid 1, n is of course ok.

 

Jack

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  • 5 months later...

I bought two of the 500GB Big Disk enclosures, and BOTH of them died on me within a month of each other. I'm never buying a LaCie product ever again. I used them as backups, and lost all of my data. Worst purchase ever! I took the enclosures apart and dropped the drives into a computer NAS. Haven't had a problem since.

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