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???

Just throw it in the garbage, ok?

If you aren't willing to seek professional assistance, trashed it is, and trashed it will remain.

Oh, Zorb... Now you did it and Green Peace is probably already on your case. Do you have any idea how long the half-life of a LaCie Ethernet Big Disk is when just thrown into the landfill?
I can always use it for target practice at the firing range, but I might as well take it to the end of its virtual road before then.
What professional assistance are your referring to? A data recovery company? It's an option, but it's a dull one. It doesn't give me any new knowledge about these beasties. What would a data recovery place do with these drives??? How do they read data off a corrupt drive when mere mortals can't? My data itself is very likely completely intact, the only thing that I butchered is whatever the RAID controller overwrites when creating and deleting a RAID0 array. I am going to assume that it's possible to recover those sectors especially since I have 2 identical drives from the same vendor, most probably clones of my drives (sans the data). If it's not possible I need to know why before this thing gets its death sentence. If it is possible, then I am all ears. Any suggestions?
Since this is a SW board, let me throw this out: I got an app called DiskExplorer. It lets you read and modify any bit on the drive. If I hook up the corrupt Drive 1 and the good Drive 1 to the same PC wouldn't I be able to pinpoint the differences in the relevant sectors and copy from the good to the bad? Would that do the trick? Which sectors should I be looking to compare (the damage has been done by an Intel D875PBZ mom using "Intel RAID Technology")?

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
Thanks

Hey guys. I managed to recover my data from a Lacie Big Disk Ethernet.

Hope it helps.

http://snorripall.com/recovering-data-f ... e-big-disk