A few days ago I reported that a friend had asked me for help. He said that he had lost 2 Samsung HD501LJ 500GB sata drives within a few hours. Both had been in a Lacie external USB enclosure. He could no longer see the drives when connected to his PC.

At the time it seemed likely it was a heat/power supply issue for both drives to fail within hours of each other.

I have now received the drives and doubt it is a mechanical or electrical issue. Both drives spin up and there are no squeaks or noise from them.

Connecting them individually to my PC via an internal SATA connector my PC can see both drives but:

using Windows XP drive 1 shows as 465GB but drive 2 shows as 976GB!!!

Using Linux (Ubuntu) both drives show up as 465GB in gparted.

I downloaded Data Rescue PC from Prosoft Engineering (demo version) which found 1000s of files on drive 1, but warned me not proceed on drive 2.

I also used Prosoft's Media Tools Pro v5.1 (demo version again) and got:

drive 1:
partition tables= 1
boot sectors= 0
fats= 0
directories= 13
file records numbers (volume)= 43034 (2)
No valid filesytem found.

drive 2:
partition tables= 2
boot sectors= 0
fats= 2
directories= 14
file records numbers (volume)= 43029 (7)
No valid filesytem found.

(I am told the data on the drives should be a copy of each other.)

So my take on that is drive 1 looks possibly recoverable but not so good for drive 2.

Hopefully there is someone here knowledgable about this software to give me an indication whether these drives look recoverable if he pays for this recovery software ....or if one or both of these drives is a non-starter.

Your experienced opinions would be most welcome.
Thanks

huuuummm

The reported size of 976 GB is taken from the partition table on drive 2, so you are most likely looking at a RAID0 or volume..


Donk!

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It´s a raid 0.

I had a case like that.

You have to rebuild the array and get the data.

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ZeBong
" что случилось в России - останется в России "
" Россия еще раз"

if both drives came from a single LACIE disk your looking at a RAID 0/JBOD. The software wont help you. What is the data worth? PM me if your willing to pay a special HDD Guru price.

I asked my friend very very clearly if it was a RAID and he told me it wasn't. But if that is the case then I bow to your better knowledge.
At the very least that will save him buying software that is inappropriate.

But..why did I see a set of files (jpegs, pngs , docs, xls) on one drive?
Would that be the case for a raid?

Thanks for the help so far.

what is the size off that files ?

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ZeBong
" что случилось в России - останется в России "
" Россия еще раз"

Hi zebong,
Not sure what files you are referring to so :
both disks are approx 500GB.
The Data Rescue software finds approx 26000 files of various types totaling approx 52GB on disk "one".

HTH

i was talking about 32kb, 64kb, 520kb, 1024kb , this kind off size per file, and could you open the file ok ?

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ZeBong
" что случилось в России - останется в России "
" Россия еще раз"

The file sizes varied but most were jpegs from 1MB to 4MB in size. Not sure why this is important?

No I couldn't restore any of the files as I was using this "demo" software. Its $99 to buy for Data Rescue and $399 for Media Tools so that's why I posted here to see if it might really be worth buying it.

The demo versions only locate any files and you need to purchase to recover the files.

Does anyone here have any experience with this software?

OldFogey,

You have to verify if your drives are JBOD or RAID 0 configuration. You can usually Google the part number or contact LaCie's so-called tech support to find out.

If JBOD, you can get files with directory info from the first drive and RAW files only from the second. That's because the files on the 2nd drive are concatenated to the first. The directory info resides on only one drive.

If RAID 0, your software selections won't help much at this point -- not until you reassemble the RAID, because the data is interleaved between the two drives.

Also, if RAID 0, you might be able to get some good data back from files small enough to be completely within the bounds of the stripe size (hence the above questions about file sizes).

The first order of business is to make cloned images of the component drives to work on.

If you don't understand what I am saying then you really shouldn't be working on it by yourself.

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Agree.

@ jono-ats,
Thanks for your helpful reply.
Yes I do know about JBODs and all types of Raid.
I had been told that the disks were NOT raided but what you say makes perfect sense and on doing a google (I should have done this before) it does seem this unit is raid 0.

Been looking at the raw drives so far but will need to get the enclosure (and raid controller) and see if I can get an image made.

Thanks again

There is a JBOD mode ( default setings for a Lacie Case 1Tb).

First , get back your drives in to the Lacie Case , and just replacement a Power Supply ( this is knowing trouble for Lacie if it worked Non-stop) .
Second, if you want virtually build raid, use the WinHex , it will help you.
For a JBOD: Cut usefull part from second drive and add it to a first drive from correct address.
For a Raid0: Сut usefull part from both drives , build raid0 from it with correct stripe-size, and add this "building" to system area from first drive.
For this operations, you need a few 500Gb drives, few 1Tb drives (for cloning) and many time.

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Angel Data Recovery

You dont need the enclosure to make an image. Clone both drives seperatly, rebuild array ising cloned drives. This must be a really good friend of yours for you to go to so much trouble. A pro might do this for a low fee.

@DR-Kiev:
Thanks for your advice. I have been googling about this enclosure and agree that Lacie seem to have a bad reputation for failed power supply units. I need to get my friend's PSU back from him and test around with a meter to see if that is the problem first.

@HDD_spaz:
Yes this has taken a lot more of my time than I anticipated. Might just get a quote from a pro to do this if the psu looks good to me, although I believe my friend is not too rich at the moment.

Trying to help him out just as folk here are trying to help me.
Thanks again.

Have you cloned both disks? If you are working off originals you may be modifying the disks contents each time it is connected to Windows. Also, working off originals will cause problems if anything happened to either of these two disks.

@hddguy:

Yes I have been working off images of the individual drives so far, until I realised that I was working with a JBOD or Raid. Duhhh.

I was thinking of trying to put both disks back into the enclosure and try to see if I could image it like that, if that would make data extraction any easier. As an expert perhaps you can tell me if you think that's a waste of time or if someone with my limited knowledge might be able to get it to work. As it's only an image I'd be working with I thought it would be worth a shot?
Cheers

edited and this added:
Also only connected the disks to windows and then linux at the very start to see if they recognised the disks. After that it was using self-booting disks as mentioned above. All the time trying to ensure I don't screw this up any more than it may be already. But my friend and another did spend a day together trying to see what was wrong before they rang me so no idea what might have befallen the disks then. Looking more and more that if it's not a duff PSU I'll suggest contact an expert. Onwards and upwards!!

If both drives spin up in the enclosure, the power supply is probably OK.

That means that the either board interface / RAID controller has failed, or else there is a software problem with the partition map or something.

I don't understand how you will make an image of the RAID of the RAID is not working . . . did I miss something? Note that if PATA one drive was Master and the other was Slave. There is a correct order of re-assembly.

Cloning the drives is a good idea for 2 reasons: 1) you'll find out if the drives have bad sectors; 2) if you screw around not knowing what you are doing, you won't damage the original data set.

If you are going to do it, don't take shortcuts. Do it right or send it to a pro.

Jono

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Hello jono-ats,
I guess you missed in my other posts here that:

1.both drives are sata
2.I have made images of each drive and worked on those so no fear that I have stupidly damaged the disks further.
3.but..before I got hold of them my friend and another had looked at them so don't know if anything happened to them then.
4. I do not have the lacie PSU yet so have not been able to determine whether it is a PSU issue or if the disk electronics could be a cause. But as I alluded to earlier a visual inspection shows no sign of a burn or poor soldering.

I fully agree when you say Do it Right and Don't take Shortcuts.
That's why I am being very cautious and asking here.
Cheers

Sorry I was a careless reader and missed the other details.

You can usually fix the power supply by opening it and replacing the 5 or 6 1000 MFD @ 16V capacitors inside with good quality, 105 degree types. The old ones probably will be bulging or leaking at the top and malodorous.

Desoldering tools are very helpful in this case.

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