Hope someone can recommend something to get me out of this ditch
LaCie Ethernet Big Disk 1TB, dies (clicking sounds from within, no recognition on either 100BT or USB).
About 700 GB of data down the toilet. I cracked it open, took out the disks and threw them into my desktop (WinXP). Drives spun up and seemed fine. That's where I made the mistake of trying to rebuild the RAID. Didn't work (obviously, since the volume is formatted under Linux, as I learned later). Got RAID Reconstructor SW. For that to work I had to delete the RAID array I created because that app tries to put together 2 drives when they are not arranged in a HW RAID array. No dice. At that point the original RAID configuration was probably lost. Tried a couple other things with no progress. Got another known good EBD box, same as mine, swapped out the drives, no pulse. swapped out just the second drive to see if I could get the data off the tail end of the JBOD (assuming it is JBOD), but nooo... Even though the drive is still recognized (OS being on the first drive of the JBOD) the logical volume doesn't work and no data can be recovered.
At this point I don't care to re-build the EBD so much as I want to get my stuff off this doomed array. The good LaCie box could not recover it. Nothing that I could run on my WinXP box could recover it (I ran apps that can see EXT2/3 partitions and/or analyse raw HD data).
I don't have a Linux box and I am a noob in Linux. I know there are tools out there for getting raw data off a drive even after it's been formatted (which mine haven't - they lost the boot sectors). Assuming the original array was JBOD, the 2 drives should have my data contiguously, not even striped accross them, so if I get the right tool I should be able to copy it off.
The big question is - what is the right tool and how can it be used to get the data off these darn drives?
I am even considering setting my desktop as a dual boot machine with Ubuntu, but I would need step-by-step instructions on what to do after the installation is complete...
So at this point, I have 1 good EBD complete with a working set of 2 500GB drives arranged the same exact way as my original one was (down to the share names and list of users and passwords) and the gutted original EBD box with a suspect power supply, a suspect controller card and 2 raped 500GB drives with about 700 GB of stuff I am dying to get back but no good boot sector. I got a Seagate utility that can copy a drive sector by sector, but what I need (I am guessing) is a way to copy just the boot sector from the 2 good drives to the 2 raped drives. Would that work??? Anyone know how to do that???

Cross-posting to multiple topics within one forum is very annoying, you frankly aren't that important. (not saying that anyone else is either)

I don't mean to be annoying. There are 3 distinct forums and I think the issue is relevant to each. To me the issue is very important, but that's not why I took the time to re-post. Someone felt it necessary to split the recovery topic into 3 distinct forums. I am willing to discuss the issue from any of these 3 angles. Do you have anything constructive to suggest?

Yeah, creating a new RAID on the drives when you didn't know the original parameters is dumb. LaCie disk raid is software based. The entire drive isn't striped, just part of it. You probably just ensured that you can't get it back yourself.

The garbage can beckons.

So is it striped or is it not striped? There is a lot of evidence on the web indicating that the soft array is actually not striped, i.e. it's not a 0 RAID, but JBOD. There are also claims to the contrary. One (which I wish I never saw) claimed it was a classic RAID-0 with a stripe size of 256. Both sides either swear that they got their data back by re-creating the array using the configuration they are suggesting or quote LaCie sources to back up their claims. In the end, neither side seems credible enough
Can anyone confirm what kind of array it is and give specifics re: configurations, block sizes, starting sectors et al?

If it's JBOD, you will see a valid volume header on the first drive, with file tables etc. If it's striped it won't make any sense at all to a normal disk utility, and will be seen as just raw data. Last drive I saw like that used a portion of the first drive for the OS, then striped the rest with the second drive for data. The first portion of the second drive (sizewise identical to the OS portion of the first) is blank. Ex. OS is located from 0-200MB on first drive, followed striped data from 200MB to 500000MB mark. Second drive is blank from 0-200MB, with the striped data between 200 and 500000MB. Not sure if that's how your model does it.

ok, based on this, I think this is in fact a RAID-0. So on the second drive even the MBR would be empty?
Besides data being present from the start of the drive, what would JBOD look like on the second drive as far as boot records/partition tables?

On the other hand, what does a self-respecting HW RAID controller do to a pair of drives when asked to create a striped array accross them and what does it do when asked to delete such an array? These operations appear to take milliseconds, so it can't be mutilating the entire disk, and I've had a motherboard a while ago that would every once in a while lose the RAID configuration and all I'd have to do would be to re-create the array anew using the same drive order and stripe size. This on a working RAID-0 array that had quite a bit of data on it and I'd never lose a bit of it as a result of that stunt (performed more times than I care to remember). How would that be possible if just creating/deleting an array messed up partition tables somewhere in the middle of the drive (it's a soft RAID, so it doesn't start at sector 0, right?)? I have yet to see definitive proof, but my guess is that these operations don't affect much more than the drives' boot records and always in the same, predictable, repeatable, linear way. I'd appreciate if someone could confirm or deny this and give more info on exactly what these operations are doing to the drives and what are my options to repair the damage considering that I have the 2 matching drives from a working LaCie box of the same model and could copy the destroyed boot records or even O/S data off those.

to consolidate the mental cramps on this issue please post any future replys to this thread here:
need-help-lacie-external-raid-array-t11456.html