2TB Lacie Big Disk Extreme

[gtd4242]

Had a 2TB Lacie Big Disk extreme come in. The array is made up of (2) 1TB Hitachi drives. One of the drives was clicking. I verified that it was not the controller board and that it was indeed the heads that were bad. So I cloned the good drive to a 1TB Samsung drive with the exact same number of sectors. After that, I used the heads from the good drive, and swapped them into the clicking drive. After the swap, the drive worked perfectly. I was able to clone all but about 28 sectors just scattered throughout the middle of the drive.

I went ahead and put the drives back in, I made sure to mark everything so that I didn't alter the original drive order, and since the drive that I swapped the heads on worked so well, I went ahead and used it. So I had one original drive (the one I swapped the heads on) and then the drive I cloned, which contained the exact same number of sectors as the original. However, whenever I go to connect the drive, it just shows up with this generic model information of something like LABDEXXXX with a capacity of 8GB and absolutely no data (I don't remember the exact error code since I've been racking my brain on this and the drive is still at my office). I felt pretty good about it when I first booted it up, because the light flashed a few times at first, and then stayed on after it calibrated, just like it should do. However, during my troubleshooting, I noticed that it also did this even with the 2nd drive completely disconnected. So go figure.

Has anybody else had an issue like this with these? From my experience I have noticed that there can be some issues with these if you use different size drives (aka bigger drives than what were originally in them), but that is not the case here. I'm thinking of just ordering another one of these drives and using that enclosure. As clean as the imaging was, I can't see there being any substantial issues there. I've tried working with them outside of the enclosure, just trying to rebuild the stripe, and I've even tried putting them together as JBOD, but nothing seems to work. I can scan it and find the partition, but the data is pretty much garbage. From my experience these drives are hit and miss as far as working with them outside of the enclosure. I've had some where they worked fine, but others you just had to use the enclosure. So I don't know. I haven't exhausted all the possibilities on this just yet, I've only spent about an hour on it this afternoon trying to get it to come up, and it's been eating me up thinking about it. I just need to get back in and work on it. I'm going to go back to working on this Monday, but just figured I would throw it out on here, in case anyone else has had a similar issue.

[scratchy]

ok,


Firstly, by plugging it all back into the box, it may have attempted to initialise it. I dont know, but it is a possibility. I know of nothing that would change the volume label other than some initialisation routines built in to the box.

1. If it is a stripe, try again using different stripe sizes.
2. If it is a JBOD you may need to experiment with different start offsets on the second drive and end offsets on the first drive.

What block size did you use when you checked for Striping ?

[gtd4242]

64, 128, 256 and 512. I have seen some Lacie drives with a 512 sector size, but didn't work out on this. It was a little early to probably post this, since I hadn't really tried everything humanly possible yet, but it's just been bothering me, because I haven't run into any of these that give this kind of problem before.

[jono-ats]

I haven't encountered this problem with LaCies.

Maybe it's better to try a software utility to handle the RAID, vs. LaCie's controller PCB.

[atammik]

I had quite similar case. I got a dropped 1.5GB Lacie which consisted of two 750GB drives in RAID0. As it was a dropped box, one of heads of second drive was dead.

In your case, I think, maybe there are some scratches on platters additional to dead heads. But it shouldn't give errors of this kind. Try to reconstruct RAID with other tools, as said before.

[gtd4242]

I had quite similar case. I got a dropped 1.5GB Lacie which consisted of two 750GB drives in RAID0. As it was a dropped box, one of heads of second drive was dead.

In your case, I think, maybe there are some scratches on platters additional to dead heads. But it shouldn't give errors of this kind. Try to reconstruct RAID with other tools, as said before.

I will be back in to work on it in the morning and let you folks know what I find. I don't think there was any scoring on the platters. I had a near perfect clone of the drive with the head failure (all but 28 sectors around the middle of the drive were able to clone, out of the total 1.95 Billion).

I have tried rebuilding the array in Winhex, and Rstudio. I guess the one piece of software i haven't used yet is RAID Reconstructor, but that is so hit or miss, I seldom use it.

[HDD Spaz]

Is this a NAS BOX?

Try looking at the boot sector to determine what file system it has. Also you might want to teach yourself how to de-stripe raid disks.

To recover the data you should use your brain and not reply on software.....Find the starting sector, find the block size, find the disk order, determine file system, apply settings in software.

[gtd4242]

No Spaz it's not a NAS box. It's just one of those standard silver Big Disk Extreme enclosures that they've been using for years now, but it's not a nas.

You're right, and it is something I will readily admit, I do need to improve my ability in regards to RAID work, and being able to manually detect the parameters. I'd rather do that myself anyway, because it's impossible to rely solely on the software and expect to be able to recover many of them that way. I've read a few things online that give bits and pieces of information for properly calculating the block size and determining drive order. I guess this will be a good time to try and figure it out on my own.

[gtd4242]

I was able to get it finally. I just worked directly from the two drives and bypassed the enclosure. It was a 16K block size. Thanks for all the input.