Lacie Bigger Disk Extreme 1TB 4x 250GB IDE Recovery

[managerharry]

Working on recovering a RAID set of 4 250GB IDE drives pulled from an old Lacie Bigger Disk Extreme 1TB. I have imaged all 4 drives with 100% success but am struggling to find the correct parameters to rebuild the RAID. Enclosure and RAID controller are not longer available. I have found the first disk and I believe the block size (256) but haven't been able to find correct order. Anyone have some tips?

Thanks!

[Dmitri]

Working on recovering a RAID set of 4 250GB IDE drives pulled from an old Lacie Bigger Disk Extreme 1TB...

I do not recall RAID parameters for this unit right away, but will be glad to look into this job remotely.
Let me know if you decide that assistance is necessary.

[safwan1967]

Hi,

Lacie Bigger Disk Has Habit Power adapter will not stable.have you tried to replace Power adaptor?if this is external power model.othwerwise the best solution is reclaime file recovery will make automatically raid , if no issues physically..

[Izualim]

Hi Harry, if you believe that the file system is NTFS you can try to look for counters in the MFT, that could help you a bit.

[managerharry]

Thanks for the suggestions. I do not have the original enclosure or power supply so that won't help. The file system is NTFS and I have tried ReclaiMe RAID Recovery however it only detects two of the four disks as members and the resultant file system does not contain any worthwhile data.

[hhddrec]

then you need recognize the other drives too, you need repair at least 1 drive for RAID5 or 2 drives for other RAID configs, if not you probaly waste data.

[fzabkar]

Assuming that the RAID metadata are stored in flash memory rather than on the drives themselves, then I expect that the first drive will have the partition table and the last drive will have a backup NTFS boot sector at the end of the user area. The first boot sector will point to the first cluster of the MFT.

ISTM that you should start by showing us the partition table.

[safwan1967]

Hi Harry,

i understand that you imaged 4 of them..it means there is no any big problem for all HDD.so why reclaime can't show all of them?if you can mount all volume to windows most of the case is reclaime file recovery will make raid configuration automatically as per my experience if drive all ok with out bad sectors.(my suggestion was reclaime file Recovery,not raid recovery).

[lcoughey]

If this is unit was a 1TB unit, then we can extrapolate that it cannot be a RAID with parity. Rather, it has to be a stripe or a JBOD, which was not uncommon for older LaCie units.

[hddguy]

Rather, it has to be a stripe or a JBOD, which was not uncommon for older LaCie units.

Or a combination of both...

[managerharry]

this is from the drive_image_1, humm....

Last edited by managerharry on October 31st, 2014, 20:28, edited 1 time in total.

[managerharry]

this is from drive_image_4, appears to be the first disk in set:

[managerharry]

disk_image_02

[managerharry]

disk_image_03

[managerharry]

this is what r-studio detects on the first disk

[fzabkar]

ISTM that you have an Apple drive that was repartitioned ("initialised") by Windows 7.

[managerharry]

It is possible the drive was repartitioned/reformatted but the owner is not aware of doing that.
when I try to assemble the array here's what comes up:

[lcoughey]

It was also not uncommon for LaCie to have these drives setup in a way that the user could quickly decide if they wanted to use it for Windows or MacOS...this usually resulted in what you are seeing.

[managerharry]

that's what I was assuming was that the small mac partitions were just to store utilities. but only two disks (disk 01 & 04) are detected as being members of a RAID 0 array.

Searching for 33 C0 8E D0 BC MBR start blocks on disks 2 and 3 and then scrolling up to start of data yields this:
DISK02

and DISK03

[fzabkar]

FWIW, I found this:

http://pastebin.ca/raw/641660

Code:

/dev/sda
        #                    type name                  length   base      ( size )  system
/dev/sda1     Apple_partition_map Apple                     63 @ 1         ( 31.5k)  Partition map
/dev/sda2          Apple_Driver43 Macintosh_SL             128 @ 64        ( 64.0k)  Driver 4.3
/dev/sda3        Apple_Driver_ATA Macintosh_SL             128 @ 192       ( 64.0k)  Unknown
/dev/sda4          Apple_FWDriver Macintosh_SL             224 @ 320       (112.0k)  Unknown
/dev/sda5              Apple_Free                          224 @ 544       (112.0k)  Free space
/dev/sda6               Apple_HFS LaCie Disk         312580600 @ 768       (149.1G)  HFS
/dev/sda7              Apple_Free                          439 @ 312581368 (219.5k)  Free space

Block size=512, Number of Blocks=312581807
DeviceType=0x1, DeviceId=0x1
Drivers-
1: @ 64 for 94, type=0x1
2: @ 192 for 101, type=0x701

ISTM that the partition structure is a match for yours with the exception of the missing Apple_partition_map and Apple_Driver43 Macintosh_SL partitions.

Can you show us the beginning of the 4th image? You have shown us the tail end of a Windows 7 boot sector. I'm interested in the BIOS Parameter Block at offset 0.