[sdiy] OT: how to save a dead Raided Drive?

[Tom Corbitt]

Is it two 250 gig drives or two 500 gig drives?

If it is two 250 gigs then it was raid 0, and you are probably in a
world of hurt. If it's two 500's you might be ok (if it was setup as
raid 1)

First off, buy a usb to ATA adapter at a local computer shop, they run
about $10-$20. Plug in both the drives and see if they appear. If both
drives appear but it claims they arent formatted, it is striped (raid
0), and your best bet is probably to find the same model on ebay or
locally (craiglist), determine that it works, then swap in your
drives. If one of the drives fails to appear then your data is gone
forever.

If it was mirrored, then you should be able to just plug it into your
computer using the usb adapter and it will look like a removable
drive. Both drives should have the same information on them since they
were mirrored.

Newegg sells 1TB external drives for around $100. You should order 1
or two now. It's a lot cheaper then the $2-$5k that professional drive
recovery runs.

Good luck, you'll need it....

tom




On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 9:28 PM, Dan Snazelle<subjectivity at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> I am asking on this list because I know that many of you have a lot of experience with computers:
>
>
> tonight i had the worst possible thing happen to my computer
>
> my 3yr old 500 gig lacie ext hard drive died. (and no, i had not backed it up...money for a new drive had been non-existent)
>
>
>
> this had three years worth of Logic song projects (many unmixed) ALL My datasheets, schematics, etc, as well as all my family's photos, etc.
> and over 100 gigs of itunes.
>
> now since it is 2 WestDigital 250gig drives in the box, i am assuming it is a raid setup with a disk controller card of some kind
>
> one thing i see happen a lot with my clients is that the disk controller dies,
>
> BUT then i wonder, if i get these drives into their own new enclosure, since they were in a RAID array, how do i get the
> computer to read them properly? does the raid system split the data among the 2 drives, or is it really just 2 separate drives that could
> be read separately?
>
> it is very unlikely that both drives would mechanically fail at once right?
>
>
> anyway.....
>
> at least i got my OTA problem solved
>
> :(
>
> any help, thoughts , appreciated
>
>
> thanks
>
>
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