Lacie Big Disk Extreme Triple Interface RAID 0 HFS+ Recovery

[stingreye]

I am attempting to recover data from failed Lacie Enclosure it consists of two 500GB drives (seagate .10 drives).

This drive was factory formatted with HFS partitions.

What I have done so far:

1) ddrescue each drive to image files. There were 0 read errors and it appears that the drives imaged 100% correctly. I believe its only logical problems with original drives and not physical. The original drives should not have anything additional written to them.
2) Transfer each image file to new 500GB drives
3) Ran RAID Reconstructor but it was unable to determine parameters.
4) Look at some information, it appears that their are partitions on one drive and not the other. I am not familiar with Lacie RAID configurations and if this is normal.
5) Ran Testdisk to see what it found about the partitions.

I do not have access to the information from TestDisk right now but I can add later if its helpful. From memory, here is what I remember:

Drive 1 - 4 healthy partitions, 2 "free" ones, 2 HFS partitions. When runnning Testdisk scan it says something about finding a 1TB HFS partition. Is this caused by RAID config?

Drive 2 - No partitions recognized. Bad mac partition. Bad sector 0. Deep Scan will identify two partitions that do not seem to make sense. Scan says drive seems much larger than 500GB.

I would greatly appreciate help in the next steps. As stated earlier, I have 2 new 500GB drives that I am working from as well as the ddrescue image files. So a failed attempt on the new drive can be rescued from the image files and the original broken drives will remain untouched.

Thanks,
Steve

[stingreye]

One more thing of note. I did try swapping the power supplies and it did not mount. I did not try data recovery from the enclosure with the unmounted drives because I assumed the enclosure was bad.

[CK]

Great to see that you made images of the drives

Usually a 256k stripe.

Use Winhex to rebuilt it.

First drive is the one with the visible "partitions".

You may need pro licence or X-Ways licence as it's a HFS+ partition.

Good luck

[stingreye]

Thanks. I will update with my progress.

Regarding Winhex, I confirmed with X-ways the following:

1) To rebuild RAID's you need the Winhex Specialist Licence

2) To access the HFS partition natively in Winhex, you need X-ways Forensic.

So if there is no corruption I might be able to de-stripe and transfer to an image file with just the Specialist Licence. If I also need to do data recovery and access to file system, I will need to look at X-ways Forensic.

[CK]

Yes

You could destripe and create an image file and scan with something like Data Rescue for Mac

[hddguy]

R-Studio is generally pretty good for rebuilding these, and supports HFS systems.

[CK]

R-Studio is generally pretty good for rebuilding these, and supports HFS systems.

True, but as the OP is a Mac user, I think DataRescue may be more appropriate.

[stingreye]

Thanks CK and hddguy for the quick and effective answers. The 256k stripe size was correct and the drive order was correct. I was able to completely rebuild the array using the Windows Version of R-studio (trial lets you preview jpegs which proved that the stripe size was correct). The virtual raid block was very effective and allowed for easy recovery. It appears I have near 100% recovery and transferred to a single drive. It appears that the files that are missing were old deleted files. Thankfully, I think only the enclosure went bad.

Thanks again.

[CK]

Don't forget to send me a beer in the mail.. Glad to hear it worked for you.

[dmoranda]

I have a similar situation as stingreye, although I'm somewhat convinced the enclosure or power supply is malfunctioning. I have run multiple diagnostic tests with easy recovery professional hooked up to the enclosure via firewire and received multiple physical errors. However, when I remove both the hard drives from the enclosure and hook them to my pc I receive no errors on the same diagnostics. I have followed the same steps as stingreye and have found that the some jpg previews are partially corrupt(banding of images). Indicating (from stingreye via PM) that the stripe size may be incorrect. I have tried 128/256 and 512 as well.

Also, my drives are maxtor not seagate. I am using R-Studio to try and recover the files from 4 separate partitions. I get the folder structure on one partition and the other claim they need to be scanned. I've gone through and scanned multiple times, but now they are still coming up with errors, saying possibly the partitions are mucked up. Which program should I use to try and rebuild the partitions? Winhex?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks to everyone in advance.

Cheers,
Dustind